A young girl shopping one day in target bought some unscented lotion as a departure from her routine! A computer which analyzed shopping habits concluded that she is pregnant!
It prompted the mailers to send pregnancy related mails in her name to her house!
Her father was livid! Are these the things they must send to a teen!
After one week, the father called up and apologized! The computer was right!
The computer worked out that she was pregnant even before her father did!
The story is true and the company is Target! The computer was designed by Andrew Pole for predictive analysis and the whole charade is mentioned in the atomic habits by Charles Duhigg!
Apparently every time we go shopping, we share intimate details about our consumption patterns with retailers. And many of those retailers are studying those details to figure out what you like, what you need, and which coupons are most likely to make you happy. Target , for example, has figured out how to data-mine its way into your womb, to figure out whether you have a baby on the way long before you need to start buying diapers!
The story is called —How Companies Learn Your Secrets—by Charles Duhigg
The story detailed the work of statistician Andrew Pole (and Target’s Guest Marketing Analytics team), who did indeed design a pregnancy prediction model
Target assigns every customer a Guest ID number, tied to their credit card, name, or email address that becomes a bucket that stores a history of everything they’ve bought and any demographic information Target has collected from them or bought from other sources.
Using that, Pole looked at historical buying data for all the ladies who had signed up for Target baby registries in the past!
Pole ran several tests, analyzing the data, and before long some useful patterns emerged. Lotions, in the example above for example!
Lots of people buy lotion, but one of Pole’s colleagues noticed that women on the baby registry were buying larger quantities of unscented lotion around the beginning of their second trimester. Another analyst noted that sometime in the first 20 weeks, pregnant women loaded up on supplements like calcium, magnesium and zinc. Many shoppers purchase soap and cotton balls, but when someone suddenly starts buying lots of scent-free soap and extra-big bags of cotton balls, in addition to hand sanitizers and washcloths, it signals they could be getting close to their delivery date!
As Pole’s computers crawled through the data, he was able to identify about 25 products that, when analyzed together, allowed him to assign each shopper a “pregnancy prediction” score. More important, he could also estimate her due date to within a small window, so Target could send coupons timed to very specific stages of her pregnancy!
This is one example; Take a fictional Target shopper, who is 23, lives in Atlanta and in March bought cocoa-butter lotion, a purse large enough to double as a diaper bag, zinc and magnesium supplements and a bright blue rug!
Then there is apparently, an 87 percent chance that she’s pregnant and that her delivery date is sometime in late August!
And is she buys a pink rug it may perhaps be a girl!
In the novel the Blue Nowhere by Jeffery Deaver; every customers buying patterns are analyzed and one such person who had suicidal thoughts or tendencies started receiving mails about cremation and end of life support and how to make wills! Your computer understood your emotions even before your own family and friends!
The most shocking part of all these? The news article came in 2012! That is more than ten years ago! You cannot even imagine what the AI can ‘predict’ now! Then again AI actually could not predict why Katapappa Killed Bahubali in the first part! So some AI respite!
By the way, my watch has already told me to start winding up for the day! That AI for you!
Shubh Ratri!
ramadocblog 