When the latest iteration of the Madden video game rankings came out a few months ago a thought occurred to me: if football players could be ranked based on their attributes and skills then what about what everyone else? What about celebrities? And what about regular people like you and me? Would we want to know on a scale of 1-100 what Tom Hanks was ranked versus Tom Cruise? Or which one of your friends was the better person? Could we use this information to make more informed decisions? To find better candidates for open positions? To find better dates?
I never wrote about that idea primarily because I didn’t know what to do with that information. The Madden rankings matter because they are tied to something tangible: playing ability in a video game. But giving real people “Madden” scores would be challenging to say the least as there would be no way to tie the ratings to real world “performance” and no tangible way to put those ratings to use for everyone. But after reading Luke Dormehl’s The Formula I’m starting to think that maybe that’s not the case. Maybe we really can rate everything and everyone. And maybe we should.
In a chapter on Emotional Optimization Dormehl touches upon an idea by technology scholar Evgeny Morozov in which it is suggested that Google may one day get to the point where they’ll be able to constantly monitor our mood and then show us specific works of art (if it detects that we are depressed) in an attempt to raise our spirits. In fact, everything could be measured so precisely that Google would know exactly how many “art units” we needed to feel better and then supply the specific works of art that would meet that minimum threshold.
Of course this raises other ethical and moral concerns about what happens to the artworks that don’t meet that threshold as they would be devalued, demeaned, or dismissed altogether but that’s beside the point. The point is that we may wind up living in a world where everything is quantifiable from our emotional states to works of art. To the point where oil works and canvas paintings could be weaponized to make us feel one way or another.
Such a world may even resemble my long-standing idea for a Game of Life, for gamification on a global scale with every person in every country being judged according to the same system, all competing for the same prizes. And since points would be assigned to literally every task you undertook, from brushing your teeth to cleaning up the environment, the end result would be a Utopian society with very little crime, pollution, or inequality. After all, who would commit a crime if doing so wiped out all of the lifetime points you and your entire family had accumulated? Moreover, who would waste time binge-watching a TV show when you could get exponentially more points reading a book or learning something new?
If the prizes were good enough (and they would be) and if the penalties for bad behavior or not doing basic things for your own benefit like going to the doctor were severe enough (and they would be) then couldn’t you reshape society in the image that you wanted simply by conditioning everyone on the planet to play along? China’s social credit system is based on a similar concept but the Game of Life would be done for altruistic not authoritarian purposes.
It may not seem like it now but these are the kind of questions that we should probably start proactively pondering now. We already know that the Age of Algorithms is upon us as witnessed by the influx of AI infused apps that already proliferate our daily lives from recommendation engines on Amazon and Netflix to the cookies that track our search history in order to deliver us targeted ads. For better or for worse we’ve come to terms with living in this age, trading in our privacy and giving up control of our data for the easy living and convenience that today’s tech conglomerates provide.
Would we be willing to accept the forthcoming Age of Optimization as well? A new era predicated on quantifying anything and everything we can get our hands on in order to better optimize our moods, emotional states, and ultimately, our very existence.
Granted, it may take some getting used to. An adjustment period would likely follow wherein we get used to being judged; the very essence of what makes us human pushed aside in favor of inanimate ones and zeros that know us better than we know ourselves. But in the end it may be for the best. A better world. Fully optimized for maximum enjoyment. One moment at a time.
Is Emotional Optimization the Greatest Idea Ever?
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