Elaine pushed back from her desk and reached up, arcing her back into a deep stretch. She’d been working overtime the last few weeks, and the tension in her neck from bending over the keyboard had become a steady ache. There were a last few anomalies in her data training set that needed to be sorted out before the launch. The intern had done a decent job of getting the missing data she’d identified — mostly paid sets from the dark data marts. It was hard to get solid payment data from the blockchain anonymity sets but the right intern had good connections.
The intern had done a great job — the new payment data plus the attention/interaction numbers she’d bought from a more above-board broker last week so far seemed to have fixed most of the gaps in her model’s training. Hopefully they were the last of what she’d need to call Humphrey shippable.
She really should have given him a more pithy name, something more evocative of a soothsayer. She knew this. Divination was, after all, her first love. It was, after all, the real reason that she had gotten this job working as a tracking scientist for Technopoly, LLC. Techno, for short. Their CEO, Gaba, was all about diversity of skillsets in hiring; Elaine’s mix of divinity school training and a PhD in molecular astronomy had made her a stand out candidate in their hiring queue. So much so, in fact, that Alfread the HR Automated Assistant had pushed her profile on Gaba relentlessly for a week.
Technopoly seemed fated to be the big name in adtech for 2020. Everyone knew their models were better. The superiority of their results was making it almost unconscionable to spend money on any other tracking tech.
Technopoly was more than product placement though. For the right level of investment, they’d help you with product design as well. Technopoly’s models would predict what products were going to trend in the next two weeks, and adjust their ad solicitation schedule to fill ad slots for products that didn’t quite yet exist. Elaine wasn’t just shaping opinion - her models had changed the way that products themselves got made.
Two weeks wasn’t enough lead time to really nail down the design and distribution of every product idea though. The more sophisticated, expensive products were going unmade. Humphrey was set to change that, in two ways. First, Humphrey’s visions were guaranteed to be accurate for up to four weeks. Much like improved radar and data sources pushed out the weather forecasts, Humphrey was a next generation in divinatory tech. Instead of relative humidity and wave heights, he understood like counts and PageViews.
Unlike the weather, Humphrey had the ability to make sure the future he predicted would happen actually came true. This wasn’t something disclosed outside of Technopoly; Gaba didn’t want to know how behavioral manipulation sat with the general public.
Early psyops attempts had used virtual hordes and content creators to sway opinions; instead Technopoly had refined the art of of meticulous ad placement, subliminal messaging made to both bring in revenue while also shaping the future such that Humphrey’s predictions didn’t just come true, but stayed true. At least, while the ad-runners were paying their bills.
Elaine’s role in all of this was to design the model that made the predictions. They called her the Third Eye. She’d been working on this new, longer prediction model for five years now.
A small chime sounded. Elaine stopped her stretches and put her fingers back on the keyboard, the strain in her back was lessened but still there. The tests had just finished — Humphrey had correctly predicted the entire Billboard 100 top selling albums for the last 15 years. Satisfied, Elaine ran one more test, used her VPN to place a few stock orders based on the results, and then started the long build process that would push Humphrey, finally, live.