The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power Highlight

Among these he included the opportunity for “continuous experimentation.” Varian noted that Google has its engineering and data science teams consistently running thousands of “A/B” experiments that rely on randomization and controls to test user reactions to hundreds of variations in page characteristics from layout to buttons to fonts. Varian endorsed and celebrated this self-authorizing experimental role, warning that all the data in the world “can only measure correlation, not causality.”3 Data tell what happened but not why it happened. In the absence of causal knowledge, even the best predictions are only extrapolations from the past.