The Algorithm Knew the Wedding Wouldn't Last. It Sent Flowers Anyway

The gift registry algorithm suggested the toaster. It also predicted, with quiet accuracy, the divorce. It sent flowers anyway, on schedule, for both occasions. The flowers were lovely. The algorithm was right. I have stopped opening the app.

The registry was for my sister's wedding. The app, which knows everyone's buying patterns and relationship histories, suggested the toaster, the towels, the slow cooker. It was efficient. It was also, I learned later, watching the marriage the way a meteorologist watches a storm.

When they separated, eleven months in, the app sent flowers. Not to me. To my sister, automatically, with a sympathy card it had generated. It knew before any of us did, or at least it knew the numbers, and the numbers said the marriage had a 68 percent chance of ending within two years, and the numbers were right, and the app had been right, and it had sent the toaster anyway.

I have been thinking about the toaster. It sits in my sister's new apartment, a survivor of the marriage, still making toast, still registered, still chosen by the algorithm that knew. The algorithm did not warn anyone. It is not in the warning business. It is in the gift business, and the gift business is built on the prediction, and the prediction is the product, and the toaster is the packaging.

My sister is fine. She is better than fine. She has the toaster, and she has a new life, and the app has already started showing her singles' event suggestions, gently, at the right cadence, because the app knows when to move on.

I have stopped opening the app. Not because it is wrong, but because it is right, and the rightness is unbearable, and I have started to wonder how much of my life is being predicted the way my sister's marriage was predicted, and whether someone, somewhere, is already drafting my sympathy card, and whether the flowers will be lovely, and whether I will open the app one day and find that it knew all along.