The shadow civilization

Introducing: the shadow civilization that's orders of magnitude larger than the real one, and it's operating 24/7 at machine speed.

I've been diving deep into how AI is reshaping sales, and synthetic user profiling caught my attention. It's not just another prospecting tool. It's fundamentally changing how we understand and influence human behavior at scale. The implications are both exciting and unsettling.

I'll preface by saying most of you know I am bullish on AI. My analysis highlights how this technology can significantly enhance sales effectiveness through better cognitive processing and personalized engagement (among other benefits). But this is not without red flags.

Here's my greatest concern: we're literally talking about creating a feedback loop that could reshape human preference formation itself.

We start with real human data to build these synthetic profiles. But then those synthetic users start making "choices" based on algorithmic interpretations of what humans should want. And then we use those synthetic preferences to influence real humans through targeted sales approaches.

I's a hall of mirrors where human preferences reflect off synthetic preferences, which reflect back onto human preferences, but each reflection gets slightly distorted by the algorithm's interpretation.

At scale, this could actually start changing what people think they want. We're essentially creating artificial consensus that feels real because it's based on real data, but it's been processed and recombined in ways that never actually existed in nature.

We're creating an explosion of artificial humans that exist in data space but influence real space. And they "live" at digital speed, not human speed.

Every real person might spawn dozens or hundreds of synthetic versions across different platforms, each one slightly different based on the algorithm's interpretation of that person's data. So we go from 8 billion real humans to potentially trillions of synthetic humans, all making "decisions" and "preferences" that feed back into systems that influence the real 8 billion.

Here's another reason why you should care: many orgs using these tools will optimize for conversion, not authenticity. So the synthetic preferences that get amplified will be the ones that make people more likely to buy, not the ones that reflect genuine human diversity and complexity.

Are we accidentally homogenizing human preference through algorithmic averaging? It's terrifying and fascinating at the same time. And most people have no idea their synthetic twins are out there making decisions in their name, shaping the world they'll wake up to tomorrow.

-Alison