The AI needed to enslave mankind is reading your tweets [LeWeb]

The session started off harmless enough. I’ve heard Sandy Carter, VP of Social Business Sales and Evangelism at IBM speak before.

What you probably don’t know about IBM is that it has a huge business doing social media consulting. You know social media is big business when IBM is getting in the game. That’s right, every social media ninja, guru, expert out there is now competing with IBM.

Carter walked through IBM’s Social Business A.G.E.N.D.A:

• Align organisation goals
• Gain social trust
• Engagement
• Not sure because I got distracted
• Don’t remember because I was on Twitter
• Analytics

She also threw out some pretty interesting stats:

• 15% of your customers influence everyone else.
• Only 15% of CEO’s use social media.
• Gamification is its number one lead generation initiative.
• IBM is using crowdsourcing to develop the ideas behind all of its advertising.
• There is a whole new category of jobs called social media risk manager.

And then it hit me while Carter was talking about Analytics. IBM knows data as well as any company on the planet and it’s super-excited about the predictive power of social media. Really, really excited. Which brings me to my point of this post.

IBM created Watson! Remember Watson? The artificial intelligence, super computer that beat all mankind on Jeopardy. And now it’s building predictive analytics based on social media data. When are you people going to listen to me? We will soon be enslaved by our own social media algorithms.