Are We Entering the "Age of Assumption?"

Hello from beautiful Monterey, California, where I'm both presenting at and attending the annual Internet Librarian conference, where the content is engaging and the environment is gorgeous.

In a session I gave this morning on "taking back control" of open Web searching, and how search engines and other technologies are increasingly figuring out what we want without our explicitly saying what we want, I ended up doing a bit of a detour to talk about something I've been thinking about for a few weeks, which for lack of a better term, I called an "Age of Assumption." Here's an excerpt of what I shared with the audience--please let me know your reactions as well...

The Age of Assumption, is an age where technologies increasingly use our profile data, and the data we provide/emit either directly or indirectly via our digital behaviors and activities to make assumptions of what we want and then go ahead and give it to us what it has inferred we want.

This is not new per se, and is the outgrowth of various technology trends like collaborative filtering on sites like Amazon and Netflix and other computing applications from years ago. But as we move deeper into the age of big data, and the data-fication of just about everything we do, increasingly our technology is getting better at figuring out--assuming really--what we want before we explicitly tell it so.

Examples include everything from our phones telling us which words it assumes we want to type in before we do so;  advertisements that have determined we are interested in their product and display it, to the rise of anticipatory search as outlined by Microsoft’s Stefan Weitz in his book Search: How the Data Explosion Makes Us Smarter. In that book Weitz says that very soon—perhaps now in some cases-- searching will no longer mean entering words or phrases into a search engine. Instead, it will mean having our intention to find or do something, inferred and anticipated by our tools and technologies; and then, in a contextually dependent manner, suggest, prompt, or remind us what we need or even complete the assumed desired action to accomplish the relevant task--and usually without informing us ahead of time.  So we’re moving quickly now it seems from technologies that simply provide information or take the next step and make suggestions to more the actual carrying out of tasks themselves, based on data, probability, machine intelligence and more.

This could be wonderful.  Or the dark side of course is what happens when the probabilistic assumptions about who we are and what we want go awry, and the ramifications of that can range from annoying to terrifying….

Have you experienced anything to share from living in an Age of Assumption?