Outsource your empathy with life prediction tool

 An Israeli designer wants to squash your digital fingerprint into one algorithm that can predict when your friends are about to be sad or the best time to propose to your girlfriend.
Predictables is a design concept by Dor Tal, crafted to provoke debate over the potential consequences -- good and bad -- of our reliance on big data.
He imagines the front end will be a kind of pico projector, which maps your life onto any surface. It's a predicative calendar that makes handy suggestions to make your life run smoother. In a video depicting the technology, for example, your life is portrayed as a series of coloured blobs in a kind of floating calendar of potential future happenings. A green blob activates and catches your attention, so you point to it and flick your wrist (the future is entirely gesture-enabled as well, of course). A warning appears that says it's three days till an important meeting, before asking if you'd like to reschedule because your team is probably ill-prepared.
How does it know this? It's using data gathered by an app you've downloaded onto your phone that scrapes your social media, email, Google searches, GPS data, photos, credit card transactions -- anything with a digital trail. Maybe it spotted a few ropey looking photos of your friends on a night out earlier that week, or recognised that their Facebook posts were actually coming from a beachside bar, not an office.
So far, so intrusive. But the system wouldn't make any decisions for you. In the video, the subject's response is to text his team to see if its ready for the meeting. Later the same man's watch projects the same calendar onto the palm of his hand, warning him his girlfriend's probably about to be sad, so he buys her some flowers.
"It is clear that today we are leaving our digitals fingerprints everywhere," Tal tells Wired.co.uk. "We can also see how these fingerprints are being used in order to create a precise profile of us for commercial uses. I suggest to return that data to the user."
The technology does not exist yet, but we're not a million miles away. Summly scrapes the news so you don't have to, and Google Now scrapes your life in much the same way Predictables is now proposing -- though for the more mundane things in life that feature in your calendar.
"The biggest challenge in this project is to create the forecasting algorithms," says Tal. "However, the further I advance in my research and the more I meet with specialists, the more I believe it will happen sooner than expected. For just one example, I have been in contact recently with Kira Radinsky who has made a lot of advancement in this field and recently even founded a start-up company that uses this kind of forecasting-algorithm application."
Radinsky, last year named one of MIT Technology Review's 35 Innovators Under 35, has been working on predicting real world events using algorithms that take in data from millions of news items and web searches, billions of tweets and much more. With it, she predicted riots in Sudan, Turkey, Syria and Egypt, a cholera outbreak in Cuba and the outcome of a drug dealer's trial. Although these kinds of systems take in billions of data points, it's argued many of these predictions could easily be done by humans. In an interview, Radinsky explains, "You can see a recurrent pattern in the riots: The price of a staple begins to climb -- in Egypt it was bread, in Sudan it was cooking gas -- and this sparks riots."
But the point is not always to come up with novel predictions a human could not have otherwise. But to have a machine always working in the background as a backup, as a reminder of where your attention should be focused and as an early warning system.
The individual in Tal's video could surely have put two and two together and realised his girlfriend was probably having a bad day -- she texts him about how much she hates her boss and starts job hunting. He could have decided to do something about it, but of course the majority of people might not take immediate action. The proposed service is simply cutting corners and prompting you to do something you should probably do anyway.
Suggesting you propose to your other half soon -- as the system does in the video -- is quite another matter, though. And allowing the app access to every corner of your digital world just to encourage you to take the time in your busy life to do the things you should be doing anyway (be nice to your girlfriend, not necessarily propose to her) sounds like quite a stretch for even the least privacy conscious among us.
"I think that the world that we live in today, and even more so the world of tomorrow, doesn't leave any room for privacy," Tal says. "And I am saying it with a lot of sorrow. I believe that if we won't stop and ask ourselves some serious questions about the role of technology in our personal lives, we will find ourselves in a world in which Facebook or Netflix suggest us when and who to marry."
So he has not necessarily developed what is a rather Silicon Valley-like promo for his concept to say this is what we should be doing. He tells us he's more interested in the user interface and user experience side of technology, and "presenting the cultural consequences deriving from an up-coming technology". He calls Predictables his "answer to the new emerging issues of big data".
Tal wants us to question where this kind of all-encompassing data sharing could lead us. And it sounds like it will lead us to become some pretty lame, lazy humans that need prompting to be nice.