There’s a vast amount of valuable data that’s completely untapped — mostly because it’s stuck in your head. Your preferences, your memories, your worldview. These are the things that shape your daily decisions, and yet software can’t access them directly.

Instead, apps infer what you care about by looking at your behavior — your clicks, likes, purchases. How long you pause on a tweet, or the fraction of a video you watch. It’s a rudimentary system, like trying to reverse-engineer someone’s personality by watching them shop. And it works, sort of. But it’s brittle, and it will soon feel primitive.

The better version isn’t hard to imagine: you could just tell software what matters to you. Define your values, your priorities, how you think, what you want to achieve. Kind of like a high-resolution database of your mind. Apps wouldn’t have to guess — they’d know. And the key difference is, you’d be in charge. Your digital environment would feel less like an algorithm trying to manipulate you and more like a tool that's actually in your service.

That's where we’re headed. And once we get there, the old way of doing things will seem as crude as trying to guess someone’s favorite book by the magazines they leave on their coffee table.

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