Pride, Prejudice, and Predictions about People

Irina Raicu is the director of the Internet Ethics program (@IEthics) at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. It is a truth universally acknowledged--or at least a belief shared by many artificial intelligence and machine learning researchers--that, given a vast database and sophisticated modeling, an algorithm will be able to predict the behavior of individual human beings. Jane Austen might seem like the wrong authority to turn to in order to dispute this. But she does have some relevant insights on the topic. You might remember that in her novel Pride and Prejudice Austen features a heroine named Elizabeth who has a lot of interactions with a character named Mr. Darcy, whom she eventually marries.