Where Do You Draw the Line? (Character)
Something strange is happening in business.
For years, companies have been told that the more they know about their customers, the better they can serve them. This seemed reasonable.
So they learned more.
Then they learned a lot more.
And now we are discovering that knowing more about someone and serving them better are not necessarily the same thing.
Walmart has filed patents describing technology that could recognize individual shoppers, connect them to their purchase histories, follow what they are doing inside a store, and potentially change what they see based on what the company knows about them.
Imagine buying laundry detergent. Walmart may already know which brand you usually buy, what you paid last time, what alternatives you considered, whether you are standing in the store right now, and what you have already put in your cart. With digital shelf labels, the price in front of you no longer has to be the same price that was there Tuesday morning.
There are wonderful things you could do with all that information. Make shopping easier. Save someone time. Help them find what they need.
Or...you could discover that this particular person almost always buys Tide and probably won’t walk away if you charge forty cents more.
That is the part worth paying attention to. Technology isn’t simply getting better at understanding markets. It is getting better at understanding you.
Delta has talked openly about using artificial intelligence to make its pricing more sophisticated and responsive, becoming increasingly precise about what a particular customer might pay for a particular seat at a particular moment.
DraftKings has faced scrutiny over something more disturbing: identifying gamblers whose behavior suggests they are likely to lose significant amounts of money and then deciding how to market to them.
Think about that. You discover that someone has a weakness, and your next question is how to make money from it.
WTF.
This isn’t AI doing this. It’s people.
Someone thought of it. Someone proposed it. Someone built it. Someone approved it. At some point, a room full of intelligent, educated people (the sort of people we would ordinarily assume are perfectly decent) sat around a conference table and decided this was clever.
Probably with coffee. Probably with a PowerPoint. Maybe somebody called it an exciting opportunity.
And that is where character walks through the door.
We usually imagine character being tested by something obviously wrong. You find a wallet. You have an opportunity to cheat. Nobody will know.
The harder tests don’t look like that.
Something is legal. It's profitable. The technology makes it possible. Your competitors may already be doing it. And the person you are doing it to will probably never know.
They may never learn anything about your character.
But you will.
Because character isn’t created when somebody catches you. It is created by what you become willing to do when nobody does.
We talk about character as a moral virtue. Be honest. Do the right thing. Treat people fairly.
But the brain has a much more practical reason for caring about your character. It is trying to figure out where you will stop.
Sooner or later, if I have a relationship with you, I will put something I value in your hands. My money. My career. My health. My reputation. My future.
Eventually there will be a moment when doing what is best for you is not the same as doing what is best for me. You may be able to make more money if I make less. You may know something about me that gives you an advantage I don’t know you have.
Character is what you do with that advantage.
Competence tells me what you are capable of doing. Character tells me what you are willing to do.
And AI is about to make us extraordinarily capable.
It will know more about the people we serve than we have ever known before. Their habits. Their preferences. Their pressures. Their weaknesses. Maybe even the moment they become frightened or desperate enough to say yes.
That knowledge can be used to make someone’s life safer, easier and better.
It can also be used to take advantage of them.
The information is the same. The choice isn’t.
And sometimes the person on the other side will never know which choice you made. They won’t know what you knew about them, what you could have done with it, or what you decided not to do.
But you will.
Make those choices often enough and eventually they stop feeling like choices. They become a practice. Then a policy. Then a strategy.
Then somebody puts it on a PowerPoint and calls it innovation.
Knowing more about someone gives you power. You can use it to get more from them, or you can use it to become more valuable to them.
Either way, you’ve revealed something about your character.
Even if nobody was watching.
