The Present: A Data Science Christmas Story
Ularbek’s mind wandered as he began reviewing the specifications of this year’s Present.[i] His planet had been at war for over a century with their Rivals in a sister solar system less than ten thousand light years away. He feared that he would never see the end to The War to End All Wars, for there were partisans of each camp in every City and every State, perhaps even co-existing in human consciousness. Given each side’s irreconcilable positions on truth, value, and human nature, he thought it was quite paradoxical that their mortal nemesis would be their sole supplier of Christmas gifts. All of these thoughts just underlined the importance of his own team’s work — to ensure that each year’s Present wouldn’t pollute the thoughts and the dreams of the children of his planet, leading inevitably to the victory of the Rivals.
At first glance, this year’s Present seemed conventional enough. The prototype was basically a classical murder mystery game, even if it did incorporate the latest bleeding edge technology. Delivered through virtual reality gear, the software encouraged participants to work together to solve a classical who-done-it. The players were guided from one virtual place to another looking for data with which they could identify the Rivals’ master spies. The integrated parental control seemed to offer a nice perk — biometrical readings of the participants’ age group fed an adaptive algorithm that generated each scene’s riddles, pains, and pleasures. Surely the Rivals had rigged the game, his job was simply to understand how.
Ularbek had long ago concluded that although the Rivals’ leaders were certainly brilliant, their intelligence was largely lost on the public at large. Their belief system was based on rational thinking which naively assumed that mankind is able to see through their own prejudices. The Rival’s ingenuity was a rare gift when it came to manufacturing Christmas toys, but a curse for leading the rank and file. All this talk about the analytical method and basing decisions on the facts was just too much to ask of those that wanted instant gratification and real-time results. Weren’t these centuries’ failures to improve mankind proof enough of the fallacy of reason? The real world was too complex for the common soul to care, and filled with too much suffering for anyone to bare…
In his own world where the masses constantly mistook data for the facts, the power of the Master Manipulators had long since triumphed.[ii] The Rivals were as foolish as they were brilliant — who wouldn’t want to become Homo Deus?[iii] Predictive analytics had replaced descriptive statistics, only in turn to pale in light of the prescriptive analytics whose end goal was to guide human behavior. Post-truth had long ago become the byline of this post-modernist world — the Fourth Industrial Revolution had given birth to the mass production of data whose only purpose was to prove its owner’s point of view.[iv] In politics, economics, and society, the spin doctors would always have the upper hand.
Of course, his team’s responsibility was to make sure that such man-made truths remained eternal. The rumors that the Rivals had now changed tactics were surely a reason for concern. To date, his team of inspectors had never failed to find the traps and re-engineer past Presents before releasing them to the general public. Time and again his team tested the new game while enjoying the thrills and pleasures that only virtual reality could offer. The weeks went by and Ularbek became increasingly worried: the software appeared to be exactly what it claimed to be — a role-based game based on the very values the Manipulators cherished so dearly. The morning of Christmas Eve arrived, he had to take a decision and decide he did. He ordered his team to substitute the game’s data set with one of his own and then to upload the software to the Cloud for global distribution to each family’s electronic Christmas Tree.
Early on Christmas day, Ularbek woke to the joyful shenanigans of his own children. They had already downloaded the Present onto the family’s VR headsets and were now ready for adventure. As much as he cared for his kids, so much early-morning agitation and joy only intensified his recent feelings of frustration. He grudgingly agreed to play the game with only one thought in mind — he would teach them a lesson worthy of the Master Manipulators themselves. As the children worked their way deeper and deeper into virtual reality, Ularbek made sure to leave them far behind. Their constant contemptuous smiles and constant laughter only exasperated him further— why were they trying so hard to accomplish so little? In two “short” hours, he easily won the game. Then, from the full height of his triumph, he scoffed at his children for their lack of foresight and cunning.
His vented anger proved to be a further source of his children’s hilarity. Surely, he was going crazy. Slowly but surely a deep inner dread engulfed him… what if they had fallen into the Rivals’ trap? At the point where he thought he could take no more of such frivolity, his youngest child spoke up, “Dad, didn’t you watch the video instructions? The objective of the game isn’t to win, but to lose.”
On behalf of the partners and associates of the Business Analysis Institute, Î would like to wish you the best for the holiday season, and a good measure of success in your personal and professional ventures in 2018!
Improving managerial decision-making is heart and soul of the Business Analytics Institute. In our Summer School in Bayonne, as well as in our Master Classes in Europe, our focus on digital economics, data-driven decision making, machine learning, and visual communications we can help you put analytics to work for you and your organization.
Lee Schlenker is a Professor at ESC Pau and a Principal in the Business Analytics Institute http://baieurope.com. His LinkedIn profile can be viewed at www.linkedin.com/in/leeschlenker. You can follow us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/DSign4Analytics
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[i] This story was inspired by Unodc’s brief, (2017), Data analysis for effective border management: the Kyrgyz Republic experience, as well as a short story I read as a teenager many years ago
[ii] The notion of Master Persuaders is developed in Adams, S. (2017), Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter, Portfolio
[iii] Yuval Harari suggests that as mankind has developed the capacity to create artificial life, we are left with the more fundamental concern of assuming the responsibility for our own destiny, Harari, Y.N., (2017), Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, Harper
[iv] Klaus Schwab argues that as the biological, physical and technological worlds come together, data and analytics will form the cornerstones of a Fourth Industrial Revolution, Schwab, K., (2017), The Fourth Industrial Revolution, Crown Business
