Perhaps, to avoid the dystopian scenario predicted by Yuval Harari, we must democratize the algorithms' knowledge of us, at least by ensuring that companies have to share the personal insights they’re gathered with us. 

Every trivial choice we make every day reveals central aspects of our i...

Consider a few examples: your choice of movies reveals the degree to which you are intelligent, conscientious, and agreeable, and your Facebook data reveals whether you are friendly or introverted. There are few exceptions to this rule, and the list of correlations between human personality trait...

Without firm self-knowledge, it’s hard to construct a logical story of who we are, the story that would make our life experience and interaction with others. This skill is complex to master, and research suggests that only 10-15% of people are self-aware.

The essence of AI is a prediction machine, which consists of algorithms capable of (1) finding patterns in large datasets and (2) training themselves to get “smarter” (increase their predictive accuracy). There are clear reasons to expect AI to improve our ability to understand things, including ...

Brands and consumers have a mutual interest in understanding consumers’ personalities. In the 1950s, marketing campaigns were grounded in focus groups and telephone surveys to segment customers “psychographically” to improve the product.

With AI, we can get a much more personalized version ...

 The opportunity for AI would be to make us aware of the gaps between how we want to be seen and what are brand and product choices convey to us. As Nathalie Nahai says in her late book, consumers are highly committed to adjusting their preferences based on the reputation of brands, including the...

The widespread adoption provides compelling evidence for the value of AI to consumers; their AI engines do little to improve our self-knowledge. So, is there any problem? 

1. Our choices become more data-driven, the consumer sophistication decreases. This is a missed opportunity in the fa...