And it's not difficult to extrapolate what predictive technologies might expose about our sense of agency once they become even better at anticipating our actions and emotional states-perhaps even surpassing our own self-knowledge. But it still reveals, to a lesser degree, the extent to which your actions are constrained by your past choices and certain generalized probabilities of human behavior. The algorithm that predicts your musical preferences is less sophisticated than the cosmic intellect Laplace had in mind. If this entity (now known as Laplace's demon) understood everything about the present world and possessed an intellect вЂњvast enough to submit the data to analysis,вЂќ it could perfectly predict the future, revealing that all events, including our own actions, belong to a long domino chain of cause-and-effect that extends back to the birth of the universe. If God can see the future with perfect accuracy, then aren't human actions necessarily predetermined? How could we act otherwise? A scientific version of the problem was posed by the 19th-century French physicist Pierre-Simon Laplace, who imagined a cosmic superintelligence that knew every detail about the universe, down to the exact position of all its atoms. While this anxiety may feel new, it stems from a much older problem about prediction and personal freedom, one that first emerged in response to the belief in divine foreknowledge. Spiritual Troubleshooting for the Digital AgeДЇor philosophical guidance on encounters with technology, open a support ticket via email or register and post a comment below. It's rare these days to finish typing a Google query before autocomplete finishes our thought, a reminder that our medical anxieties, our creative projects, and our relationship dilemmas are utterly unoriginal. Amazon suggests the very book that we've been meaning to read. How many times a day are we reminded that our actions can be precisely anticipated? Predictive text successfully guesses how we're going to respond to emails. But if its premise is correct, we all must be slowly losing our minds. I have no idea whether this actually works-I've never been sadistic enough to try it. The logic, as far as I can tell, is that by convincing a person that their thoughts are entirely predictable, you steadily erode their sense of agency until they can no longer conceive of themselves as an autonomous being.

I once read somewhere that if you want to slowly drive someone mad, resolve, for a week or so, to occasionally mutter, вЂњI knew you were going to say thatвЂќ after they make some casual remark. One of the streaming music apps I use creates customized playlists for me, and it's scarily good at predicting songs I'm going to like.

Musi app