George Lucas got the future all wrong (and not just because Star Wars was set in the past). There’s no way Obi-Wan Kenobi would have advised Luke Skywalker to close his eyes and feel the force. He would have told Luke to collect copious amounts of data, analyze it, and optimize accordingly. That future, it seems, is already here as Virginia Heffernan suggests in her NYT Mag piece, A Sucker is Optimized Every Minute: “The gut is dead. Long live the data, turned out day and night by our myriad computers and smart devices. Not that we trust the data, as we once trusted our guts. Instead, we ‘optimize’ it. We optimize for it. We optimize with it.” We’re creating a future where Yoda is more likely to be a Jedi data warehouse manager.