THE COMPUTERS ARE ‘WATCHING’ – DATA THAT CAN PREDICT YOUR FUTURE

The computers are ‘watching’ – data that can
predict your future

This glimpse
of the future was crafted by: Mark Stone

The field
of prediction is about to take a giant leap forward. We all make predictions.
When companies hire an employee, they predict that they will do a good job.
When they launch a new product, they predict that consumers will want it. Call
it a hunch, or even experience – we all make judgement calls about the future.
This is how things used to happen, but this is all about to change…

Traditionally,
‘predicting’ the future was a process of trying to understand behaviour in the
past and marrying this with predicted trends to produce an estimation of future
behaviour. Advances in technology will change this as we move from using
historic data to using live data and this will give rise to a world in which we
are offered predictive, proactive choices.

Imagine
finishing work, jumping into your car and seeing your phone flash the following
text: “Twenty-eight minutes to your home in normal traffic conditions.” How did
your phone know you were going home? In the future, all mobile devices will
know this. They won’t only be able to predict your travel time, but your travel
behaviours too. They’ll know where you’re going before you do!

How does
predictive behaviour work?

Take
public transport as an example. At 6am on any given day, your phone would send
a notice of your intent to travel to an integrated mobility platform. You would
then drive to your local train station. Based on this knowledge, your phone
would indicate a desire to travel (demand) to the train function of the
mobility platform. The system would then identify suitable services for you and
identify any service delays or issues. This would be relayed back to you and
you would replan your travel and, if required, nominate a new intent to travel.

What is
its value?

Predictive
travel keeps the consumer informed and in control of travel choices. It also
provides visibility to transport and infrastructure operators of user demand.
Imagine a scenario in which the predicted demand for a service exceeds
capacity, as per current peak hour periods. Utilising predictive transport, the
two-way feedback loop would provide alternative travel choices – alleviating
congestion and consumer frustration. This kind of data could be a game changing
force in terms of informing and shaping demand to match available capacity.

But
predictive transport planning is just the tip of the iceberg. Already, computers
are watching and mapping out your behaviours. They’re getting better at looking
for trends and recording your habits. From this information, they can make
predictions about what you want, where you want to go and what you might like
to buy. Rather than relying on judgement calls, predictive analytics and
self-learning algorithms will soon be able to make intelligent predictions
about all sorts of things, and they will ‘serve’ you up a diet of your
preferences, whether you actually knew you had a preference or not.

The use
of real time data and predictive modelling could have an enormous impact on new
ways of price setting across hundreds of industries. Transport is already
priced in this way – you pay more for an Uber ride during peak hours than you do
at other times. Imagine extending this model. It could influence the choices we
make around where we eat (is the restaurant full?), and where we go for
entertainment (where are my favourite movies showing tonight?). It could
facilitate supply and demand price setting and provide ‘sale offers’ to you
when demand is low, stimulating compulsive purchases and balancing supply and
demand production at manufacturing plants and supply chains.

As a
result of increased pricing at peak times, predictive economics could be used
to smooth out peaks as opposed to engineering solutions that attempt to use
storage systems or load shedding systems to smooth demand, or worse still,
build more infrastructure to meet peak demand.

Matching
supply to demand has been the nirvana that has eluded every manufacturer and
every provider of mass infrastructure. With predictive analytics, nirvana may
be within reach.

This is a
whole new world of engineering. It rewrites many of the previously entrenched
‘rules’. Within this world of digital engineering, there is likely to be a
digital solution to just about every problem we know. We just don’t know it
yet.

(Aurecon has launched a new futuristic
blog! Called Just Imagine, it provides
a glimpse into the future for curious readers, exploring ideas that are
probable, possible and for the imagination. This
post originally appeared on Aurecon’s Just Imagine blog. Get access to the latest blog posts as soon as they
are published by subscribing
to the blog.)