AI Profiles
A frightful and fantastical future of personalisation awaits
You are the sum of many things. Basic biological information defines you partly: age, sex, race, etc. Health markers set your predisposition to disease risk. You have a history of interests: kinds of books, movies, Youtube clips, games, sports. All the things that you engage with and consume. You have a community of family and friends and colleagues and neighbours. You have located in certain geographical areas, and travel according to patterns. Your financial situation is determined by current employment, savings, and inheritance. Your consumption history is a reliable mix of groceries, restaurants, bars, entertainment outlet, retail stores, online shopping. You are unique, but measurably so.
Health, work, interests, community, consumption. Unwittingly, you have shared much of this information with internet technology firms. Gmail has your personal emails, Youtube has your video history, Google has your search history, Maps has your driving and location patterns. Apple and Samsung have your phone and app usage. Whatsapp has your contacts, Instagram has your community and media preferences. Microsoft has your Teams work chats, and your Outlook office emails. Twitter/X has your preferences for ideas and news. Amazon has your shopping history, your reading list. Substack has your writing. Spotify knows what tunes you love. The AI labs have stored your many conversations.
Depending how online your life is, the collective internet holds an uncanny reflection of you, a digital identity, your digital profile. For now, your personal data is locked and fragmented; but less so than you think. The great internet monopolies treat you as the product, and your data is gold. Meta has your Whatsapp and Facebook and Instagram data. Alphabet holds your Gmail and Youtube and Search and Gemini histories. Amazon has your Kindle and shopping history. X has your feed preference and your Grok chats. Netflix has your movies history. OpenAI has your ChatGPT chats. The list goes on and on, and add smaller players like Reddit, and Quora, and larger players like telecomm firms. Your unique life seems quantifiable, codifiable, AI interoperable.
In the aggregate, if these data points could be united, an AI would have a pretty good picture of you. The collective data you’ve shared is rich. This is something we should be really worried about, and incredibly excited about.
Let’s start with the negatives. I already have massive security and privacy concerns about the big tech firms. Now we face a future where the upside of unifying our online profile is so tempting that we may worsen this privacy nightmare. Single profile sources could easily tell hackers where you live, what you earn, how you spend, who you love, what media you consume, your hopes, your dreams, your deepest secrets.
Why would we move closer to this dystopian nightmare? Because personalised AI is that useful, so completely satisfying.
Imagine feeding your complete AI profile to ChatGPT or Claude. You don’t need to answer stupid questions to get the good answers: they know you. They know where you are, what you like, what you’ve done before- only relevant stores and restaurants and media and products and people (!) are recommended.
From the profile you share, they know you like action movies on Friday nights. So when you say “recommend a movie”, you know it will be something appropriate to you, and better yet - with Imdb and Netflix data - they know what you’ve seen and when. How about re-watching Taken - you loved that movie and it’s been over 10 years since you’ve seen it… No? How about this new action release, 7/10 on Imdb, we think you’d give it a 9. Friday night movies are now sorted.
Want to take a trip? Here’s an itinerary that others with your interest profile enjoyed. The top hit: Food tour of Japan. Based on what you earn, here’s the itenary with the most appropriate budget. Based on your work emails and calendar, this period will be the best time to go and this matches with the quiet season for Japanese tourism. Based on your family size and preferences, these are the best flights, the best lodgings, the best inter-city train times, the best restaurants, the best, the best, the best.
We will be fed the optimal everything. We will become like the fattened goose with media and product and recommendation pipes straight to our stomachs. Foie gras for the corporate overlords. It will all feel so easy. Thinking is optional, let the AI do the work.
Media is easy. What about health data? You’re male, 51, overweight, prostate cancer in family. Every Wednesday evening, your Personal AI prompts you for that run (your Strava history indicates this is the time of day you’re most likely to move). Continued poor compliance to the running suggestions? AI rethinks the approach to get you going. Your search history indicates you like surfing. Here is the closest coast, and the best spot and time to try a surf. Exercise nudges tailored to your interests.
What about work? Based on your profile, here are some projects you might like. Hell, here is the career best suited to you. For your age and interests, maximal earning potential, and region and education, apply here - we have auto-accepted your application at company X. Oh, and your first weeks work output has been uploaded for review should you choose to accept the position.
And your interests and hobbies? AI can tell you what to do. You pick, it picks, irrelevant as long as you’re happy. Computer games have a higher satisfaction score than reading, TV time beats outside play. Based on usage data, kids are happier when in front of screens so the AI will happily recommend more online time.
Youtube has an algorithm that largely keeps feeding you what you’ve liked before. Watch a lot of rugby highlights or animal vids - quite likely your feed is full of rugby highlights or animal vids. But the AI algorithm must be better (it knows you so much better). You can train your AI also. Set your novelty dial. Do you want to continue with your current identity, or perhaps set the dial to 80%, so that 20% of what you’re recommended is novel (but liked by those similar to you - not completely novel, a warm and normalised novelty). Don’t like this? Set the dial back to 100% and profile AI will keep you happily set in yours ways.
The age of AI will infiltrate gradually. In the same way Google became a major feature in our lives, and then Instagram and X and Youtube. Like the internet age, and the social media age, we engage as much as possible (and more than healthy) to get the benefits. This should be our chief fear in the AI age - that we give more than we give back and society is worse off than before. Of course we want the benefits: With admin tasks, for creativity prompts, for the automation of office drudgery, for daily planning, for health nudges. For everything. A lot of this will feel amazing. Better book recommendations, more time for ourselves.
But beware the dark side of this AI moon. We risk over-investing and over-engaging with the great online brain - and this new frontier may not have the requisite protections and regulations. If we are passive, like we’ve been in the age of online media - mindless AI agents will shape us in ways we underestimate, exposing folks to bad actors, allowing the wolves to tear through the sheep.
In the near future, we face the threat of a great convergence. A world where everyone starts acting and thinking a lot more like each other. A grey cloud descending. Once brilliantly different, far-flung cultures already have started to feel same same. Globalisation set off the physical part of monoculture, the digital onslaught is now in full cry.
By all means, use the AIs, but be careful with what you share and how much of yourself you give away to be AI-ready. Take yet more care in how your kids use this technology - we have no idea about the impact (opt, still, for offline learning and socialising and nature and those time-tested facets of development).
The prosperous will be those that give the AI agents just enough too get back valuable assistance. But not enough for the AI to shape back in turn. Use the tools, marvel at the progress, but Hold your secrets: keep your fiery kernels of individuality to yourself for now. And keep working and thinking offline as well. At least until we see where this all goes.
