Manufacturing Mates

The Amazon.com kindle is just one of many e-readers flooding the market currently. In fact, e-readers are going to pretty much shut down the brick and mortar side of the print industry within the next few years. Authors will leverage this paradigm shift to self publish. There will be a lot of book sharing between people. In effect, this will do to books what the Ipod did to music. And although the music industry will cry foul and that people are stealing copyrighted material, the result will be that more people than ever will read on a regular basis. In fact, these e-readers will be the final enabler for people to sell serial stories on a mass basis for the first time. Once publishers and authors adjust to this new paradigm, they will make even more money than ever!

Well so much for speculations about the publishing business. But something that you have to be aware of is the amount of information that companies like Amazon glean from your e-reader habits.  Likely you already know that they use the titles that you purchase to figure out what to recommend to you. Most people would just consider this to be good merchandising. Most people are not aware that Amazon also tracks what you are reading and what you are re-reading as part of this exercise. Just because you buy a book does not mean that you read it and like it. They track how fast you read it, and if you re-read it. The creepy thing is that they also track anything that you highlight as well. They are also sharing this information with publishers so that publishers know what it is that people like within each publishing genre. How scary is that?

Welcome to the true electronic age.

People have been bandying about the term electronic age for over 30 years, but it is only in the last 10 years that it is really getting into the types of machinations that we saw in George Orwell's book 1986. It would seem that our society was a bit slow in living down to George's low expectations of us.

You may wonder what it is that these companies are doing with all of this personal data.

So far, the publishing companies are focusing on choosing plot scenarios that are sure to sell well. They have been financing assistant ghost writers for popular series writers to accelerate their output.. At the same time, they are able to check for consistency of story lines. The star trek series of books through 20 years was written by a series of guest writers. Can you imagine how much better and more successful that series would have been with better character consistency, better plot consistency and better knowledge of what it was that their buyers liked and did not like? What do you think that similar tactics could do for the likes of Nicholas Sparks, Luanne Rice or Ken Follet?

So take it a step further. Why have a real author at all? Why not have an author team and create an artificial persona to front them. They can be cagey and invent a fictitious person by doctoring a photograph, create a website with a blog, have a bunch of social media profiles, and hire a PR team to look after that persona. They could play up the fact that the author has agoraphobia and will not appear in public. Now you get a team of ghost writers to start working on new books, and an editor checking for consistency of story lines if the books are supposed to be a series. If they are just all of a genre, then the only check is for consistent style. Of course the next step in this sequence will be to hire people to do blog posts and answer email from these fake entities. Faced with this, most people would just assume there is a living, breathing person that belongs to the name. Welcome to the likely future of the big publishing companies.

There is another industry that would benefit from applying similar information and tactics. That industry is Web Dating Services!

The work that Microsoft is currently doing with computer interaction is truly impressive, but likely the gaming industry will be the only near-term beneficiary. Apple's deployment of SIRI in a big way is also likely to shape a lot of near future technology.  Voice technology is most critical on small mobile devices, but will find their way into most computer based systems.  The really interesting part will be when voice, gesture and face recognition technology is widely employed in other regular home appliances and vehicles.

What if these gesture recognition, face recognition, interactive voice and video technologies were combined? What if you could come up with a simulacrum that would be able to interactively chat with someone? What if they can recognize you on sight, pull up your previous conversations? What if they can tell if you look sad or tired?

Almost every dating site on the Internet has some form of contact initiation mechanisms where they entice people to respond. Part of this is to get them out of the habit of being lurkers, but mostly it is to coax people into signing up or upgrading to a paid membership. When people upgrade so they can reply to these messages, they have people on staff to interact with you.  So that hot chick that seems to be so enamored with you seems too good to be true, and probably is. There ain't no such thing as a free lunch, and dating sites have to make money to stay in operation. It is not all fake, but some of it is.

It takes a while to find someone to mesh with even on a dating site. You will never do so if you quit too soon, or if you are too timid to interact in the first place. These systems may seem money grubbing and greedy, but they do serve a useful purpose. People who hang around longer are more likely to be successful at finding a match.

Likely the next step for the dating industry would be to manufacture ideal profiles for you based on what you are looking for. You are looking for a 5 foot 5 inch brunette with a trim figure, a steady job, who does not smoke and is not interested in having children. Well amazingly enough, there are a few that have joined up in the last few weeks when you log in and search. In the couple of moments that it takes you to complete a profile, and log in, they could have a bunch of perfect profiles created for you to interact with, and they can keep creating a few more every day for you to find.

What might the next step be? In a decade or so, it should be possible to have a computer generated entity that can interact with you one on one via video chat. Programs currently exist that will can interact with you, and they will fool most people into believing that there is a real person at the other end. Where the media focuses on the more mechanical aspects of artificial intelligence, like walking and running robots, the true breakthroughs that need to be made are on the intelligence side of the equation.  At the present time, nobody has invented a computer based mechanism that is capable of independent thought.

So if you are on a dating site and want to know if a person is real or fake, just try to enter into a video chat with them. The fake ones will never commit to it. If they will not video chat with you, you will know one of two things. They are either lying about what they look like, or else they are really a fake entity. Either way, you are better to seek other people, either on that site or on other sites.

Currently then, your litmus test for determining how authentic someone is on a dating site is video chat. If they are available to video chat, then they are legit.

In spite of all the negative information we just talked about, dating sites do work. I mean, people lie all the time, even in bars. People hand toss out fake names like crazy. Any dating site has literally millions of real people looking to interact. There is a strong chance that many will be in your own town, even if it is small. If you are a man, to minimize the artificial contacts, just upgrade to a paying membership as soon as you join. That will pretty much ensure that you ware always interacting with real people. Women should just join sites where women can interact without paying and men have to pay. These sites will only show women real profiles. Women are strong communicators, so there is no need to entice them into conversation. Sites were men can interact for free tend to be full of cheapskates and unsuccessful men, stay away from them!

This blog post should enable you to understand the more negative side of dating sites, and what is possible. Dating sites do provide a useful service in spite of this, and are worth joining. Just make sure you keep your sensibilities about you.  For a list of some of the better sites, click the link below:

Dating Sites