I just had a weird experience, one possible interpretation of which is that my iphone just read my mind
So I just finished Mission Impossible, latest movie, in the theater. I tend to avoid Mr. Cruise because of him personally, but darn it if he's not a decent actor and usually has a top notch crew. Also, Simon Pegg filters some of the evil. I give it a B+. What's relevant to my tale is that the movie features an evil, possibly sentient, very pervasive AI that is very accurate in its predictions.
After the movie ended, I brought forth my iphone to look at while the credits rolled to a post-credits scene that never came. I glanced at a newsletter, which had "Pickleball" in the subject line. Now, I happen to think that pickleball is a sign of the apocalypse, and that the 1000 years of satan's rule will look a lot like Wall-E (who is obviously Christ). I was mulling posting a quip about that, and thought further that the quippiest way to do that was to talk about life on the ship in Wall-E. So I tapped the search bar and started typing "what is the name of the ship . . ." and, this where it gets freaky, before I could continue to tap out "in Wall-E" Siri suggested the fandom page for Wall-E.
Bzzz-wut? I checked my histories, I have not mentioned Wall-E or pickleball anywhere, to my recollection, I have never even mentioned it to anyone (I have probably complained abut pickleball in a general sense). As far as I know, the concept has only ever lived in my mind.
Now, I don't, as I sit here in this moment, believe that Siri can detect my thoughts. But it is a downright Fortean confluence of seemingly unconnected mental activity and external reality. I found (in my very short search) only one other mention, at hipinions.com of pickleball being related to Wall-e. If it is not merely coincidence, and not AI reading my mind, it is very peculiar and particularly well timed and specific predictive association by the AI, and one which I am certainly not entirely comfortable with, perhaps the first time I have ever had such a hmmm moment with technology.
It might be interesting what happens next, now that I have entered this datum into the AI's processing materials. Watch this space for further developments.
P.S. the ship in Wall-E is named "Axiom."
One of the commonly quoted things in my marriage is the phrase “no mess no fuss”. My husband and I got it from a silly YouTube video that the algorithm chose when we let it wander. We say the line frequently and genuinely unironically to describe when something is frictionless or satisfyingly simple and easy (example: “I prefer iOS over Android because it’s no mess no fuss” or “Want to do takeout for dinner tonight instead of cooking? It’s no mess no fuss.”)
A few nights ago, the YouTube algorithm played the video for us again, and we talked a bit about our “no mess no fuss” phrasing appreciation.
The following morning at work, I started up my personal radio station on Apple Music. The first song came on, and what did I see queued up after it?
I’ve never listened to that song before, though I have admittedly listened to some of Ralph’s other music a good amount, so the idea that my personal radio would choose a song by her isn’t that far fetched.
But the idea that it chose that specific song? And right after our conversation about the phrase? I’ve never been more convinced that my phone knows way more than it’s letting on, and it’s trying to cheekily let me know.
Reminds me a little of this podcast episode.
A man has a similar experience of something happening in real life being reflected in an ad which Facebook showed shortly afterwards. He suspects that the phone was listening in on their conversation to gather data. The hosts look into whether this is possible / actually happening.
Anecdotal coincidence.
Typing "what is the name of the ship" in my search bar on a fresh installation of Chrome has "in wall-e" as the fifth suggestion, among others like "the matrix", "guardians of the galaxy", etc.
I don't have the same experience in other browsers and other computers, especially not when browsing in private mode. Further evidence it's not reading my mind, but not conclusive on predictive ability.
There is another possibility, with which i am also uncomfortable (a statement on my emotional development), that I am simply not as unique or clever as I like to think that I am.
With however many millions of people who use these devices and contribute to the data pool, it should be a gift to feel clever at all. Rock on.
Have you considered that there are other external, subliminal factors that brought Wall-E to mind that you have not yet accounted for but which may be more directly related to that search term being recently popular, and that your religious Millennial beliefs may make you more susceptible to apophanies? I also typed your search phrase into Google, to which it suggested "in wall-e" among other popular Disney and Fox films.
I was not familiar with the term, but am the concept. It was just so spectacularly specific it caught me off guard. Also I could well be in the beginning stages of schizophrenia, who isn't in this age?
That said, I would be curious to see a systematic review. It might not be surprising that most tildes users (or even many redditors) have the same query cueing. But other folks? My kids computers did not produce the same result, nor did my computer that I strive hard to keep free of tracking. For that matter, even google did not produce on the same iphone or on my regular computer.
Ah, well then perhaps it's not your beliefs, but as you have suggested, the more raw state of your mental health which could be seeping into various parts of your mind and throwing off some basic aspects of pattern-forming. Take this with a grain of salt, but if your brain is over-actively building patterns out of your environment, the results can be uncanny to the point of disturbing.
I did my Google search on an iPad using Safari. Again, taken with a grain of salt, since Siri web results tend to be provided by Google, it could be that Google themselves provide different results based on anything from device identifiers, to browser agents, to other key factors that I'm just not thinking of (geography, public IP, purchased data-sets, licensing to use that data in x scenario vs. y scenario, etc.), which may explain the similarity between your and my results as well as the discrepancy with your iPhone and other devices.
I've had those incidents as well, and I can't help but assume it is just we don't always associate things as uniquely as we think we do. I sometimes have funny minutes where I'm watching an older home video and I make a quip simultaneous to my past self saying the exact same thing at the exact same inflection and delay after watching whatever it is, years apart. It's just like my brain processed the same information at the same speed in exactly the same way.
Given that they can take millions and millions of thought processes via search terms and/or the blob of data they have tracked, the fact that they could predict our next thoughts or searches when encountering a specific set of events isn't so far-fetched.
The association you have of the pickleball to apocalypse to Wall-E ship might not be relevant. It might simply be that given your search profile that if you were looking for the name of a ship, it most likely is going to be the ship from wall-e over probably the very limited set of ship names the mass of humans search for.
When I search for the what is the name of the ship, I get, "that brought the pilgrims to America" then alien, treasure island, peter pan, star wars, and so on down the line. That comes up for me because I've searched in the last few months for history stuff for my kids, not sure where alien came from, I might have searched that in the past, my son was also reading Treasure Island, I definitely had googled about it sometime in the last few months also. The next list is pop sci fi ships down the line as it looks like it is guessing at that point.
My point is really that our past history really narrows down what we generally look for. If you've never mentioned say the expanse or watched that series, there is no reason you'd search for that ship name unless you use that as a keyword to narrow it down.
The point is that our minds associate the same way, so even if the connection obtuse, if a million other people search from one term to the next, then the algorithm is probably going to get there ahead of you, which feel weird.
All that is said, this is clear evidence for how much power big data is in the hands of people that are trying to squeeze advertising and/or politically influence you in some capacity. I don't feel like the average person truly understands the power that properly analyzed big data can provide.