Carissa Véliz

Plenty.

Profits gain their power from people believing them.

If we decide to defy this prediction instead of obeying it, we will choose products that are more respectful of privacy, for starters.

Hannah Arendt wrote that it's pointless to argue with a murderer about whether their future victim is dead or alive.

The only appropriate response is to rescue the person whose death is predicted.

Well, today's prophets are predicting the death of our democracy, and the only appropriate response is to rescue it.

In ancient Rome, it was illegal to predict the death of the emperor for the very simple reason that they ended up with a murdered emperor on cue.

I'm not suggesting that we do away with prediction.

I'm going to continue to use my weather app every single day.

But we need a public debate about the acceptable and unacceptable uses of prediction, and we're currently not having it.

Meanwhile, dozens of algorithms are making decisions about your life right now.

It might be that in the case of insurance, we might want to make predictions at a population level, but not for individuals, because it creates unfair self-fulfilling prophecies.

Plus, if we're being billed according to individualized predictions, that means that we're basically paying for our own way, and insurance loses its reason for being, solidarity and the pooling of risk.

It might be that in cases in which fairness matters, we might prefer transparent and contestable criteria to predictive statistical pattern matching.

Let me start to bring things together.

Even though self-fulfilling prophecies are nothing new, they are being supercharged by AI in ways that make it more urgent than ever to think more deeply about predictions.

First, predictions are never facts.

They are speech acts.

Second, they invite manipulation.

Third, they create and cover up injustice.