Serendipity in the age of the predictive self

In the age of Pandora, Netflix, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Match.com, many aspects of our lives are becoming more efficient. We are getting served more efficiently the movies/TV shows we love, the music we love, the books we love, the people we may end up with, the holidays we might enjoy, the friends we may want to make, the professional network we may want to build. It is an idyllic picture where we are able to use tools which help us more efficiently get all these things that we want.

There are a few mechanisms/technologies that we are using that allow this discovery and matching process to become more efficient. From pure peer review, social networks, correlation, machine learning and artificial intelligence, the tools we are using are becoming more predictive. I will not talk about these tools and mechanisms in any detail as there are many people who are vastly more qualified to speak to those than I am. What I would like to discuss with you is the following question — What happens to serendipity in our lives as a result and does the answer matter?

Serendipity is defined as : the faculty of making fortunate discoveries by accident.

Serendipity implies some chance happening which is favorable to the person.

In an age of the predictive self, what happens to serendipity. I would suggest that there are 2 possibilities (and variants that fall under these):

1. Serendipity increases.
2. Serendipity decreases.

Before delving into each of these possibilities, I would like to point out the obvious, which is that even before the predictive tools, we did not live in a vacuum where everything would happen purely by chance. Whereas now we tend to increasingly find new movies on Netflix, before now movie reviews and word of mouth would be the curation and discovery mechanism for us consumers. Before finding a mate through Tinder or some other online mechanism, we would meet people through friends or through situations such as school, work or a bar. So the context of the “old world” is that we do not live in a world where everything that happens in our lives is serendipity (in the old world, much is happening within a range of predictable universes — so that is useful to set as a baseline for this discussion).

Taking the first possible case: Serendipity is increasing

The argument there is that with all these tools, we get matched with the books, movies, music and people we want to get matched to with incredible efficiency. If serendipity is a function of the universe of information we consume and people we are connected to, then one would argue that with a more efficient matching mechanism, we are expanding the universe from which serendipity can find us. We may also be increasing the frequency of matching taking place (think about how many more books we may be reading because of the better discovery channels — Amazon), so serendipity strikes more frequently in a larger universe of possibility. Some people would also say that the online mechanisms for dating mean that they meet new people at a frequency previously unknown to most people (a boon to some, perhaps not to all participants in the dating market).

The second possible case is that serendipity actually decreases with this more predictive world.

If in one sense, the tools help us find the things we like based on our current preferences, they may end up defining our universe which is too much based on our existing self. One example might be if in the old world, I would discover a book by browsing the physical bookshelves and reading a little bit about them and almost by chance seeing a book in a section that I would not have otherwise come across, in the new world, it is more likely that I would be prompted by Amazon to read the next book based on what I purchased before, making the probability of finding and reading that “off the beaten track for me” book less likely. In economics terms, one might say there is a substitution effect that happens. Because the discovery and matching are more predictive, we have less time and inclination to be exposed to these more random things that might otherwise have happened to us. Our universe of possibility in one sense is actually shrinking if we think about those “off the beaten path type” of things. And there is a substitution effect happening where those “off the beaten track things” feature less and less in our lives because our needs are already being met by the predictive tools and we have less time for those things. So, the more frequently we use the predictive tools, the less serendipity we come across because we end up coming across more predictable things, and less the off the beaten path type of things that happen to us.

What is happening?

My guess that is that both the first case and the second case are true at the same time. Whilst our universe is increasing in one sense and the frequency of using predictive tools can lead to more serendipity in our lives, there is another effect happening which is that along certain dimensions (the off the beaten path type of universe), our universe may be shrinking and along that dimension of our universe we are interacting less and less with those off the beaten path type of things. We will need data to work out what is actually happening, how large (if at all) these effects are in our lives, in the short term and the long run for different types of things.

Why does this matter?

Our journey in life, in terms of our views, beliefs, ideas, character, the horizon of possibility, opportunities and decisions we make are, to an extent, influenced by the information we consume and the people we meet. In other words, our future self is tied to a large extent to the information we consume now and the people we meet now. The “default” set up in the old world in terms of the information and people we meet, influences who we are in the future. The same is true of the new world. If the information we consume and people we meet, change, then our future selves will also be different to what they would have been like if the old world system was still in place. The question then becomes what is/will be the effect of the new world framework on our future self? Serendipity is a proxy by which we look at what our journeys look like and how our self evolves over time. You may say that this question also existed in the old world and you would be correct. What is different now and what is certainly going to be different in the future, is that predictive tools will be ever more present in most aspects of our lives, from dawn to dusk, and in fact probably even during our sleep. And the way these tools are part of our lives is almost imperceptible, they are seamlessly part of our lives, which means that in an extreme version of the future, those tools will become the primary (if not the exclusive) way in which we consume information and meet new people. So understanding the effects of this large change in our environment is important.

Being aware these are the mechanisms happening almost imperceptibly around us in our daily lives can help us design our lives the way we want. For example, many of the predictive tools are optimizing for things that we will enjoy, or in certain cases, that we will click on, or that we will buy in that moment. The thing being optimized for is often the sale of a product of some kind which also happens to be what we would be most likely to click through at that moment. We may decide upon reflection that the short term outcome for ourselves may not be the outcome we may want for ourselves in the medium or long run.

The crux of this question is this: If we build tools that optimize what we enjoy based on our current self in so many aspects of our lives from dating, making friends, reading books, articles, watching movies and TV shows, the clothes we wear, are we going to end up with our future self which does not change much (or in an interesting way) from our current self?

There is also a broader question for society — how people evolve over time also has an effect on everyone else — we are influenced by others. The question is then what kind of society we end up with.

Elevator video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BgRoiTWkBHU

Looking back at our own paths, how does our life evolve?

A look at these pictures will tell you a journey that is probably quite difficult to predict even with all the information in the world about me. Why did I make the decisions I made, which led me here? From Mauritius to Oxford, to London, via Chicago and now Silicon Valley. What made me think of the UK as a place to go for education? What made me think of going to London for work. Why did I go to an investment bank? Why did I go to business school? Why am I now working on a startup?

It is likely that some of the reasons for these decisions were because of my environment and how the environment shaped my thinking. My parents always made me believe I was capable of being good at what I wanted to do. I wonder what my life would have been in this new world of technology which can more efficiently serve me things I enjoy? Would I have been served up by the machines different types of books and TV shows? How would these changes change my environment? Would I have made the same choices I made?

[This writing largely follows a talk given by Rama in Menlo Park in March 2016]