By early 2015, IBM announced that its Watson Personality Service was open for business. The corporation’s machine intelligence tools are even more complex and invasive than those used in most academic studies. In addition to the five-factor personality model, IBM assesses each individual across twelve categories of “needs,” including “Excitement, Harmony, Curiosity, Ideal, Closeness, Self-expression, Liberty, Love, Practicality, Stability, Challenge, and Structure.” It then identifies “values,” defined as “motivating factors which influence a person’s decision-making across five dimensions: Self-transcendence/Helping others, Conservation/Tradition, Hedonism/Taking pleasure in life, Self-enhancement/Achieving success, and Open to change/Excitement.”

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 862