This made me realize that I am a little Jekyll and a little Hyde.  The Dr. Jekyll in me thinks that no one should be tracked if they don’t want to be and everyone should be able to choose how they are marketed to.  The Mr. Hyde in me loves the idea of tracking users, segmenting customers and using machine learning to enhance marketing campaigns.  This seems like a clear contradiction, am I a schizophrenic? In hopes of convincing everyone reading this that I am not a hypocrite, I will try to rationalize my thoughts.  

I believe that the constitution provides everyone with an inherent right to privacy, including online privacy, and should be forced to actively opt-in to a service where you give up that right.  This means that a privacy policy on a website should not automatically opt you in to a  tracking service.  On the other hand, I also believe that marketing strategists should be able to tailor their campaigns to as small a customer segment as they can.  This means that if the strategist selling jewelry knows who shopped for high-end clothing recently and only wants to display an ad to that specific customer, they should be able to.  The only caveat to my second statement is that everyone who is shown those customized ads has to opt-in to them.  

Most marketers don’t agree with me because it would make their lives harder.  Not only would they have to ask before being allowed to track a customer, they would also have to ask before showing a customized ad.  I think most marketers assume that if people are forced to make a conscience choice, they avoid making it and use the default settings.  This would cause marketers to have a lot less data about their customers and would not be able to make as educated a guess when choosing where to place an ad.  

I, on the other hand, believe that people make conscience choices about everything they do and would welcome another one.  I also believe that having less tracking data to work from may mean more work for the marketer, but it will also result in a better product and a better ad.  This is where scientific marketing comes to play.  Marketers should start by making a hypothesis based on a small amount of data and then try to prove it with experimentation and watching more data.  In effect, scientific marketing is a little behavioral targeting and a little marketing psychology, but it conforms to a world where privacy matters!

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I agree with him that the media has taken some fantastic accomplishments and focused on the wrong or easiest aspects, but how could they have known which was the hardest or easiest task?  In the article he refers to a picture of the Sony Aibo dancing after having played a successful game of robot soccer autonomously.  Doug points out that the dancing was the easiest part of the entire task to do, which he is right about.  Does that matter to most people?   I don’t think most people realize that making a robot dance is less complicated than making it find a ball and kick it.  If you were to think of it in human terms, most people would classify both tasks as similarly complex.  Dancing involves moving with some sort of coordination and so does kicking a ball.

I don’t think the media is to blame, I  think it is the AI communities fault for not marketing their accomplishments properly.  We try to get each other’s respect and recognition, but never look to the rest of the world.  Most people don’t know how hard it is to accomplish true AI, they only know what they see in the movies and in the papers.  I work as a consultant and when I mention that I used to work with Elizabeth Sklar, PhD developing educational robots, most people start talking about the Roomba.  This is their association with robotics.  The AI community has already done bigger and better things, like the DARPA challenge, but hasn’t marketed it enough.  We see AI and Machine Learning in use in our everyday lives, like on recommendation engines on Amazon.com and Netflix.com, but since they aren’t highlighted and marketed as AI tools, no one notices them or refers to them when AI is discussed.  

I think that if we market our AI accomplishments and make them easy for everyone to use or contribute to, the community will gain tremendously.  I think a marketing effort could take a generation of web-savvy children and make them into AI researchers or developers.

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