A critical approach to Machine Learning forecast capabilities: creating a predictive biography in the age of the Internet of Behaviour (IoB)

Abstract

Based on the notion of the Datacene, understood as the time when data directly affects the social, cultural, economic, political, and even affective structures of the present, in this article we propose how Big Data and Artificial Intelligence give rise to the Internet of Behaviour: a new technological paradigm that has incredible potential to forecast and induce human behaviour. Since ancient times, humans have wanted to predict and alter the future, but in the last ten years, this wish has begun to become a reality due to great advances in the field of social engineering, raising serious doubts regarding social control and the loss of freedom. In this context of analysis, we present two projects developed within the framework of Art, Science, Technology and Society. Data Biography shows the enormous number of digital traces that we generate daily and uses them to compose a person’s biography, composed of 365 printed books. Machine Biography, for its part, investigates how current artificial intelligence techniques can predict and induce future human behaviour, for which we have used various forecast and generative models trained with data from our own digital activity, in order to generate another set of books with our foreseeable activity for the year 2050. Both projects invite us to consider from a critical perspective the present and future of the social transformations produced by Big Data and AI.