Quid and Primer Founder Sean Gourley: If You Don’t Own the Algorithm, the Algorithm Owns You

It was all the way back in 2013 when Sean Gourley published a blog post titled Prediction just is a parlor trick. Manipulation is much more interesting. In it he wrote: “The 2012 election will ultimately go down as the ‘prediction’ election (aka the Nate Silver election), 2016 may well be the first ‘persuasion’ election. An election where models accurately predict the likely outcomes of different strategic decisions for both parties in real-time. Where instead of trying to predict which voters will likely respond favorably to your existing message, you instead find voters that don’t like what you are saying and use targeted algorithms to create custom narratives that will change their voting preferences. But of course one side will only have this technology for so long — eventually, both sides will have this technology and we move into the world of competition between algorithms…” Given his incredible foresight and the recent revelations about Cambridge Analytica’s role for both the Brexit as well as the last presidential elections, I thought that Sean Gourley will be a great expert to interview on Singularity.FM. During our 3-hour conversation with Gennady Stolyarov II we cover a variety of interesting topics such as: his quest to understand the world we live in; big data, prediction, and persuasion; the mathematics of war; Quid and being able to see the unseeable things; Primer and accelerating our understanding of world; teaching vs manipulation; Facebook, privacy, surveillance, democracy and free will. You can watch the full video interview here: https://www.singularityweblog.com/sean-gourley/