The article isn’t very clear, but the novelty here is that this is unprecedented hypertargeting to individual users. Instead of the current website partner, days-before-flight, and other general factors that affect everyone’s pricing mostly equally, think Uber’s pricing, where you are quoted $40 for a ride, and the person right next to you is quoted $25 for the exact same ride thanks to their dynamic data-driven (and ethics-free) pricing.
This opens the possibility that Delta will charge you more solely because the data Delta has been able to acquire for you suggests you’ll pay more. And that black-box AI system could base it on all sorts of nefarious reasons - e.g., your mother is dying in the hospital, increasing your desperation to get a flight to that location, which makes its way into the dynamic “motivation” index in the AI calculus, which doubles the price of your flight.
We’re not there yet, but when you see the sorts of things Uber does for reference, I feel it’s a clear path to airfare’s little corner of our coming dystopia.
e.g., your mother is dying in the hospital, increasing your desperation to get a flight to that location
Airlines have lower mourning rates specifically for that. There are many other bad reasons for them to charge you more, but this one is a poor example.
Don’t need ai for that. They have been doing it for decades.
The article isn’t very clear, but the novelty here is that this is unprecedented hypertargeting to individual users. Instead of the current website partner, days-before-flight, and other general factors that affect everyone’s pricing mostly equally, think Uber’s pricing, where you are quoted $40 for a ride, and the person right next to you is quoted $25 for the exact same ride thanks to their dynamic data-driven (and ethics-free) pricing.
This opens the possibility that Delta will charge you more solely because the data Delta has been able to acquire for you suggests you’ll pay more. And that black-box AI system could base it on all sorts of nefarious reasons - e.g., your mother is dying in the hospital, increasing your desperation to get a flight to that location, which makes its way into the dynamic “motivation” index in the AI calculus, which doubles the price of your flight.
We’re not there yet, but when you see the sorts of things Uber does for reference, I feel it’s a clear path to airfare’s little corner of our coming dystopia.
Airlines have lower mourning rates specifically for that. There are many other bad reasons for them to charge you more, but this one is a poor example.
They used to pay someone to do it.