Spike Jonez’s “Intention Economy”
I agree with Rob Leathern and Doc Searls that artificial intelligence, when it arrives, will usher in a new age of advertising that obviates the neccesity for human readable ads. Instead, ads will dissolve into machine readable signals enmeshed into the matrix parsed by our personal agent as poigantly depicted in Her (2013) directed by Spike Jonze.
Jonze envisions the Intention Economy (Searls, 2012) in Her (2013) with Joaquin Phoenix playing the lead and Scarlett Johansson voicing his AI assistant. In this future, just like always, there are businesses that need customers. The protagonist works for a hand-written greeting cards service (humanity-as-a-service?). Somehow this business gets matched to customers. The AI assistants handle this.
There are brands—we see logos on the buildings outside his apartment window. But there are no ads in this world. There’s only a single scene (above) depicting a billboard-like display typically ubiquitous in sci-fi films. Otherwise, commercial images are scant, scarce, this pollution has been cleaned up. AI has obviated ads in favor of the deeply intimate personal assistant that knows everything about you and negotiates with other bots on your behalf behind-the-scenes for your products and services.
Let’s take a look at few scenes to re-imagine Her (2013) as a vision of the future without invasive inference (surveillance) based advertising.
Here’s the trailer if you’ve never seen the film. No spoilers below.
We see logos on the buildings, so brands still exist. But there’s no need to plaster these buildings with ads. So they don’t.
The packaging of products like the water bottle and the lunch stand startlingly lacks labeling in the traditional sense. The AI in everyone’s earpieces is handling all the signalling and transacting, transparently, invisibly.
Everything’s a negotation in the Intention Economy but you’re free, not captive. Your AI is continuously filtering and hailing products and services with other bots and will anticipate your needs and make trusted recommendations. You’re fine with your AI conducting total surveillance on your life because you know she’s protecting you in the digital marketplace.
The customers keep him busy at work. The AI agents efficiently route businesses to people’s needs and wants, matching supply and demand now that the archaic methods of direct response junk mail have finally been abandoned—intentions not inferences.
We still look down at a device on the streets though.
And we don’t really know what becoming intimate with an artificial intelligence will do to our individual psyche and the fabric of cultures.
Robots in the grocery store complete the picture. Anything but this tho.
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