The Implications Of Creating Addictive Products

If you want to understand how valuable behavioral science is to a digital business – there’s your answer. Creating a product people want might make you a few million dollars. But creating one that people can’t live without – that could make you 59 times richer.

Combine this with other behavioral insights, and the implications are clear. Creating digital products and services using behavioral data can drive positive behaviors, but, as Professor Shoshana Zuboff from Harvard Business School claims, we are in danger of it ushering in “an age of surveillance capitalism.” We are witnessing that the rush for businesses to automate using the capabilities of machine learning and AI simply mean that this is now happening faster, at greater scale.