IBM commercialized academic personality prediction into a vast commercial service

Evidence

By early 2015, IBM announced that its Watson Personality Service was open for business. The corporation’s machine intelligence tools are even more complex and invasive than those used in most academic studies. In addition to the five-factor personality model, IBM assesses each individual across twelve categories of “needs,” including “Excitement, Harmony, Curiosity, Ideal, Closeness, Self-expression, Liberty, Love, Practicality, Stability, Challenge, and Structure.” It then identifies “values,” defined as “motivating factors which influence a person’s decision-making across five dimensions: Self-transcendence/Helping others, Conservation/Tradition, Hedonism/Taking pleasure in life, Self-enhancement/Achieving success, and Open to change/Excitement.” — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 862

Categorization

• DEFINE: Gives the concrete IBM Watson Personality Service taxonomy - twelve needs and five values dimensions - as an operationalization of behavioral surplus.
• SEED: Essay angle: the five-factor/OCEAN academic model’s journey from personality psychology into surveillance-capitalist customer matching as a case study of academic capture.
• XREF: connects to: Corporate and defense funding followed academic personality-prediction research. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 857; Pentland’s sociometer turned social interaction into instrumentable, predictively modelable data — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1339; University research centres get absorbed into commercial ventures for prediction capacity — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 2375

Broader Connections

• Pentland’s sociometer turned social interaction into instrumentable, predictively modelable data #expands (0.75) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1339