You do know that all that information you give Facebook they use against you, right? From your name and your age to your photos and everything else. They use it to create marketing and advertising perfectly targeted towards you and your friends. It’s totally evil!

Ok, the above quote isn’t actually attributed to anyone. It’s more of a paraphrase. A sentiment that you and I both have probably heard quite frequently as of late. Now, my point here is not to directly defend Facebook and what it does, but if you think about it for a second, is that even possible?

To take your all of your personal information, no matter how expansive of a data set it might be, and use it to perfectly suggest a product that you will absolutely be helpless to purchase seems like an AI-complete problem to me. It would require computers to be as intelligent to people. No matter how much data a system had to work with, how many cross-compares of similar demographics it could draw from, and how many habits it knows, it would never figure out that like my lawn mower in red, and he likes it it green. At least not until it could know what it’s like to be human. The truth is humans just end up being different in very boring, undefinable ways, no matter how similar their data might be.

For example, why are these oh-so-famous famous identical twins, who have nearly the exact same demographics, upbringing and everything, sporting different clothes and hairstyles?

The idea of using demographic information to perfectly target ads is probably very attractive to Facebook’s advertisers, to be sure. That’s probably why they will do nothing to kill that myth. I also have no doubt that targeted ads will be capable of making better suggestions then the television ever could. I just think the paranoia just might not be worth it.

So if what artificial intelligence is solved? Well the computer / robot uprising and the complete eradication of the human race will take place, of course. No worries about being shown the most perfect pair of socks ever then.

And if you know what, even those real humans who know the equivalent of 1000 petabytes of data about you will still fail at making halfway good suggestions sometimes. (“Uh yea, the sweater… uh… is nice, Mom….”)

Anyway. Just another reason to stop worrying and love the internet. That’s all.

(The title for this post comes from this comic.)