Recommendation Engines (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series)
Michael Schrage
The MIT Press (September 2020)

How and why recommendation engines can help to create more valuable people

I have not read in recent years a more entertaining or a more informative book than Recommendation Engines. I felt a sense of dread — and loss — as I worked my way to the final chapter. This is a must read for anyone who enjoys putting white caps on their gray matter.

A more practical value is that it will help those who read it to accelerate their personal growth and professional development, especially now when there are countless opportunities for them to collaborate with machines in ways and to an extent that did not exist until recently.

According to Steve Jobs, “Some people say, ‘Give customers what they want.’ But that’s not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, ‘If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, “A faster horse!”‘ People don’t know what they want until you show it to them. That’s why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.”

In this volume, Michael Schrage “Defines, discusses, and details what recommendation engines are and what makes them special…[Then] places recommendations in broad historical contexts ranging from oracles and astrologers of antiquity to contemporary curators and self-help gurus…[Next he] reviews the history of recommendation engines themselves, their academic origins, commercial engines, and multitrillion-dollar global impact…[And then he explains] how recommendation engines work [and] examines the challenge of converting implicit, explicit, and side data into structures that can be algorithmically converted into recommendations…[before he] examines recommenders with user experience in mind…[and then] offers three brief incisive case studies that illustratively bundle the algorithmic and UX exposition…[before concluding] with apocalyptic/aspirational visions of possible, probable, and inevitable recommendation engines futures.”

I agree with Schrage: “The right recommendation at the right time is exactly what an Amazon, a Netflix, a Facebook, a Spotify, a Google, a LinkedIn, a Tinder, a TikTok, and a YouTube aspire to. That makes their ambitions transformative. Their massive, high-powered ‘recommendation engines’ not only algorithmically anticipate what ‘people like you’ desire, they nudge users to explore options and opportunities that might never have crossed their minds.”

When a recommendation is right (i.e. appropriate), Schrage observes, it “offers ways of both understanding the world and understanding oneself. Recommenders prioritize the world’s most relevant options and choices for your consideration; those recommendations ostensibly reflect one’s tacit and explicit desires: that slice of the world that matters to you.”

I cannot recall a prior time when there were more emerging technologies with greater impact. They include  artificial intelligence (AI); sensors and the Internet of Things (IOT); autonomous machines — robots, cobots, drones, and self-driving vehicles; distributed leaders and blockchains; virtual, augmented, and mixed reality; and connecting everything and everyone: 5G networks and satellite constellations. I view the disruption they continue to cause as both creative destruction (as Joseph Schumpeter characterizes it) and creative construction (as Michael Schrage suggests in this book).

Consider carefully: “The challenge these breakthroughs pose is how best to help connect with their possible future selves. Can recommenders and selvesware combine to help users better bridge ‘what to do next’ and ‘who they want to become’? Trend may not be destiny, but it seems clear that innovative opportunities for agency and empowerment more than rival the real risks of dependency and exploitation.”

Those who share my high regard for this book are urged to check out Michael Schrage’s previously published books. Also two others: Steve Brown’s The Innovation Ultimatum: How six strategic technologies will reshape every business in the 2020s, and, Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow.