Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein presents some disturbing statistics about “predictive shopping” in his NY Times Op-Ed, “Shopping Made Psychic”. Unfortunately, Sunstein doesn’t emphasize the downside to his findings. Without sufficient critical commentary, it’s too easy to be too optimistic about the wrong way to build the future.
Sunstein defines predictive shopping as companies determining what we want to purchase and getting us the desired goods and services before we actually choose them. Such crystal ball consumerism, he notes, takes us a step beyond programs set up for recurring purchases and automatic bill payments.
To find out what Americans think, he conducts a survey of 500 respondents. Here’s some of the key findings.
- 41% would voluntarily enroll in a program where algorithms determined what you want to read, made book selections on your behalf, and bill your credit card in the process—at least if was possible to opt-out and return the texts if dissatisfied. However, 29% would still approve of this business model if a seller enrolled them without their consent.
- 31% approve of hypothetical smart homes designed automatically determine when residents run out of staple goods (like soap and toilet paper) and order them on their behalf without explicit consent being offered.
- To get a sense of generational differences, Sunstein asks university students about their preferences. “69 percent approved of automatic purchases by the home monitor, even without consent."
Now, Sunstein does acknowledge potential problems. “Companies could end up charging you for things you don’t want, and if sellers create detailed profiles on the basis of your previous purchases, your privacy might seem at risk.” But overall Sunstein gives us the impression that so long as we’re not financially exploited, folks have good reason to see predictive shopping as liberating—as a means of avoiding wasting time on tedious and annoying tasks that generate opportunity costs and divert our attention from more meaningful activities.
But is there more at stake than meets the eye when it comes to outsourcing our orientation to the future?
While obsessing over things that haven’t happened can be debilitating, anticipating the future is crucial for our survival and happiness. We simply can’t live well without having a good sense of where our lives are going, as well as the lives of others we influence and are affected by. Bills need to get paid. Relationships need to be tended to. Future generations depend on us not building a world they’ll find inhospitable.
It isn’t easy to prepare for the future. Some are better than others when it comes to delayed satisfaction. But in general we’re biased to prefer rewards that come sooner rather than later.
To avoid falling for short-term benefits that leave us with terrible long-term consequences, we’ve got to have a clear sense of how the things we’re currently doing will impact what comes next. Of course, knowing about lurking danger doesn’t guarantee we’ll make good choices, as Sunstein’s work on nudging shows. Nevertheless, even if reason is overrated, forethought remains important.
One way we become inclined to think about the future is by…thinking about the future. That's how we develop anticipatory dispositions. Shopping lists for the grocery store may seem mundane and be a hassle to write. But they’re not just about ensuring we have enough soap and toilet paper. Viewed as a ritual that involves deliberation and self-guided action (including writing or typing), they’re a practice that pivots our consciousness beyond the present. Writing shopping lists ourselves and meeting the goals they outline by doing the shopping ourselves keep us sensitized us to the passing of time and our shifting place in it. They aren't the only tasks that do so. But if we see them as insignificant, we might undervalue others, too.
The question, then, is what happens when technology with outsourcing power spares us from doing the little things that give us little glimpses into the future. Will we focus more on the big picture, or will it disappear from view, little by little?
