A world where AI has all the answers, and you are along for the ride

This is a possible (and honestly not extremely likely) future thought experiment about the future.

The year is 2035. You are planning your yearly vacation with your family. With the assistance of AI, this is easier than ever. Your AI assistant already knows your hotel preferences, a beach resort with family friendly activities, as well as your flight preferences, frequent flier info (including miles), and credit card benefits. So you simply have to tell them the dates you want to go, any flexibility you have, and let the AI handle the searching, comparing, and boring tasks for you.

Of course this is all somewhat redundant since all the major travel aggregation platforms already know all of these things. Through a series of trackers, fingerprinting, and data brokers, nearly every platform can accurately identify within moments of installing an app.

This creates huge convenience for the user. You no longer have to suffer through products, listings, reviews, or content that doesn’t fit with your desires. In addition, with such accurate fingerprinting, fraud has become nearly nonexistent.

This convenience extends to nearly all shopping, which is mostly online. Prices, reviews, even product photos and videos, are all specifically targeted at you. They may be generated by AI or selected from a database of human input. Each is designed to maximize the probability you will purchase the product.

This might sound dystopian as it is, but there is a more sinister side to such personalization. These issues upset markets and create information asymmetry so large that it tears at our humanity. When companies know everything about you, you can’t hide your net worth or your desires (prurient or otherwise).

The most apparent problem with super accurate targeting and personalization is that it is now impossible to “get a great deal”. Instead every discount, promotion, and deal you see was specifically generated to motivate you to purchase and to maximize profit. For those with higher incomes this means a higher price for nearly everything, befitting their higher incomes. Conversely those with lower incomes see lower prices.

Since all prices and content are super personalized, consumers don’t have the ability to see prices that other consumers are paying. This creates vastly different prices for different consumers.

The same is true for hotel rooms, rental cars, and basically every other product where the price is not directly listed on a public sign that can’t be customized. Digital menus in restaurants, ordering pizza online, anything with a digital price you see on a phone or computer. Products differ in price by more than 100% for the same seat on the same route, depending on the consumers income.