Something very similar to this is happening whenever Google serves you an ad; there’s a whole underlying auction architecture comparing your past habits to advertisers’ bids and optimizing projected ad revenue (estimated likelihood of you clicking on the ad times advertisers bid per click on each ad).
The difference is that human attention is the limiting resource and machine resources are cheap enough to spend prodigiously. In the early days of the Web that wasn’t as true, so people saw huge walls of poorly targeted ads. Those ads wasted attention (i.e. annoyed people more than necessary), so they were abandoned.
Something very similar to this is happening whenever Google serves you an ad; there’s a whole underlying auction architecture comparing your past habits to advertisers’ bids and optimizing projected ad revenue (estimated likelihood of you clicking on the ad times advertisers bid per click on each ad).
The difference is that human attention is the limiting resource and machine resources are cheap enough to spend prodigiously. In the early days of the Web that wasn’t as true, so people saw huge walls of poorly targeted ads. Those ads wasted attention (i.e. annoyed people more than necessary), so they were abandoned.