Siri, You Can Drive My Car

The main thing that’s going to happen with predictive analytics is that it’s just going to become more pervasive.  It’s going to be more ingrained.  It’s going to be used more and more.  We’re already being predicted all the time.  It’s influencing our experience – it’s hard to know how much.

I like to look at the year 2020 and say, “Well, what’s gonna happen when you’re driving to work?”  So one of the things that’s happening now is that your Smartphone is being more integrated with your car.

It either has its own integration to the cell network or you’re just docking your Smartphone. Either way you’re on the Web when you’re driving.  You’re connected.  You’re connected to the Cloud.  You’re connected to the ability to predict.  And this is going to actually affect a whole bunch of things, even just in your first hour of the day commuting to work in a car.  So you try to start the car and it takes some biometric readings and it says, “Hey, that’s not really you.” And it won’t let you start the car to prevent theft of the car.  It gives you recommendations of where to go grab breakfast.  It’s recommending restaurants knowing that you’re going to turn off the recommendations if you don’t like them.  It’s going to reroute your drive based on predictions.  Not just current traffic conditions but predictions of traffic to come – and use that to reroute the way you’re commuting to work.  

So even just in the car the fact that you’re there in the first place, you know, and this is where it’s become sort of invisible –  because you’re taking it for granted.  But the reason you have a car is because you were able to get approved for a car loan, right?  Which was based on a good credit prediction about your ability to pay.  The reason that you were approved for car insurance is because there’s a prediction about your risk as a car driver.  The fact that you’re healthy today is because there was a prediction that guided preventative health care that your physician paid heed to.  So all these moments have been brought to you by prediction.  Predictive analytics is so pervasive and at the same time easy to take for granted because most of the things you’re not seeing it.  You can only see it if you see a report on a desk inside the organization.  But you do experience it – it does affect your experience every day and will continue to do so more and more.

In Their Own Words is recorded in Big Think’s studio.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.