Oh my god...this is such a funny song. I'm not sure yet if I like Robbie Williams because I've only heard a little bit of him. Apparently he's a megastar everywhere but in the U.S. This song (lyrics) was perfect for our Vegas trip:

In walked this big, bad-ass baboon into my bedroom
with 3 monkey whores
"Hi, my name is Sunshine. These are my girls.
Lace my palm with silver baby oh yeah
and they'll rock your world"

(Though none of us ordered any monkey whores.)

I love this! A bunch of CMU guys got together and formed a company called HyperActive Technologies (their crappy flash site doesn't work in FireFox on the Mac) and they've created a product called HyperActive Bob that predicts fast food orders based on the cars driving into the lot. Bigger cars, more food and a tendency towards kids meals, chicken nuggets and french fries; smaller cars means more hamburgers. The initial trial was at a McDonald's in Chippewa, Pennsylvania, but they've got them in 7 McDonald's and a Burger King and a Taco Bell in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida now.

Advanced Interfaces, also of Pennsylvania, has a similar, but more advanced technology. It records images of people entering a restaurant and makes inferences based on gender and age. Women like salads, men like meat. You get the idea.

All this, of course, immediately makes me think about the privacy implications of all these cameras on rooftops and doorways. My guess is that they're not storing these recorded images indefinitely, just long enough to make the calculations and update cook orders. But what's to say they won't? Advanced Interfaces has a video mining service for customers to send in hours and hours of recorded video tape for analysis. So, hypothetically, you could be recorded on videotape entering your favorite retail shop or restaurant, and then that footage could get sent to AI. A human being isn't watching all that video. A human might not ever see any of that video footage, but eventually widely available imaging technology could be sophisticated enough to be able to make out who you are. In any given geographical area, someone somewhere -- human or computer, could piece together your entire daily, weekly, monthly schedule. It's a hypothetical, but certainly not a far fetched one.

A part of me finds this creepy, and a part of me is fascinated by the marketing aspect of all this information. And how easily you can predict behavior and influence it.