Despite increasingly sophisticated edge computing in our devices and vehicles, true personalization remains elusive, pointing to more fundamental limits. Even today’s artificial intelligence systems are hampered by this absence.
“We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us,” John Culkin once observed. In our post-algorithmic age, the opposite seems true: the tools built to serve us end up reshaping us. In our pursuit of efficiency, we’ve ceded the subtlety of choice; the small human quirks that make each journey ours are sacrificed to the machine idiocy we’ve come to call convenience.
No one put it better than the late Steve Jobs.
“Technology alone is not enough — it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our hearts sing.”
Personalization might seem, at first, like just a technology feature. Yet today’s maps don’t recognize the weekly coffee shop trip as ritual, and algorithms don’t sense the rhythm of a drive shared between friends.