Prediction Abuse

       Prediction Abuse

If an evil corporate overlord ever got ahold of a human-prediction machine, then he needn’t bother with manipulating markets or elections.  He could just mess with VIP’s heads. He’d meet them ‘unexpectedly’, and explain that ‘my hand calculator predicted that you’d come here’. What a diss! At first the target will laugh this off, but after ten such meetings will experience acute existential angst; and when Mr. Predictor uses his hand calculator to predict, on the fly, just what the target is about to say, so that he and the target speak in rapidly rising crescendo, in unison... the target first struggles, then panics, then gives up; and then will do whatever he is told to do. That’s prediction abuse.

         The thing is, prediction abuse only works on certain types of people; namely predictable people; the shallow, the blinkered and the rigid. If you have a sense of humor or tragedy, then that nasty mind-rape trick fails; the target freaks out creatively. (For instance, the target and the simulation might have a conversation of their own!) But if you’re humorless and ideological, and lack verve or depth, then you’ll crack. The slackful bend, the robots break.

         The tragic irony is, any evil corporate overlord who would abuse this technology would be precisely the type most vulnerable to its effects. Eventually he’d try prediction abuse against some loser nobody; but that loser nobody would in fact be a Warrior Saint of Slack, soulfully immune to mechanical thought, and who turns the tables on Mr. Predictor.