'The Future of Me': Technology and the outsourced self

We are increasingly outsourcing our identities to computers and algorithms, argues Ed Finn, director of ASU’s Center for Science and the Imagination and assistant professor in the School of Arts, Media and Engineering and the Department of English. What we traditionally think of as our real physical self coexists with numerous digital “shadow selves” that help store our memories, evaluate our financial reliability and tell advertisers what products we might want to buy, or which TV shows we’ll want to stream next.

“Our digital breadcrumbs now tell stories about us that are deeply secret, moving, surprising – and often things we don’t even know about ourselves,” writes Finn in a Future Tense article for Slate prompted by the Emerge: The Future of Me festival on March 7. This outsourcing of selfhood to digital repositories can be disastrous in cases of hacking and identity theft, but the horror stories are only part of the picture. Instead, Finn likens our current relationship with our data to adolescence: “our data is sprouting up in all sorts of weird and awkward places, pumping out signals about us we can barely understand, much less control.”

Our digital selves accompany us (or precede us) to job interviews, first dates, loan evaluations and insurance claims in unexpected and often eerie ways, but there is also a rising trend of people getting in touch with their digital doppelgängers. Lifelogging pioneers like Stephen Wolfram and Nicholas Felton have spent years, or even decades “recording and curating countless aspects of their own daily existences and then mining that data for new insights, often quite beautifully.” Lifeloggers like Wolfram and Felton use their data not only to quantify their lives, but also to explain how and why things happened the way they did.

Finn concludes by exhorting us to “keep learning to read and write in these new languages.” If we can really see our shadow selves and recognize their power over us, “maybe we can even get them on our side.” To learn more about the outsourced self, read the full article at Future Tense.

On March 7, ASU will present Emerge: The Carnival of the Future, featuring thrilling performances, interactive displays and immersive experiences that cross and obliterate the traditional boundaries between engineering, arts, sciences and humanities beneath a giant circus tent in Downtown Phoenix. Finn’s article is part of a Future Tense series exploring this year’s theme, “The Future of Me.” Learn more and RSVP at emerge.asu.edu.

Future Tense is a collaboration among ASU, the New America Foundation and Slate magazine that explores how emerging technologies affect policy and society.