True, at the moment there is no unified social credit system in the United States. But there could be. All the data is there, dispersed in widely separated databases. 

The grocery store that gives you a savers card knows what you buy. So does Amazon, of course, and Walmart. Your bank certainly knows. And the government has all kinds of data about you. 

Most of this information is sort of firewalled, though breaches and hacks in security have resulted in quite a bit of this information leaking, leading to rampant identity theft crimes.

But what if a company could start to find a way to access first, all the data it has on you, then, second, through reciprocity agreements and data sharing agreements that may come about in the future, amalgamate additional data and then use it to come up with instant personalized pricing just for you. 

The point of doing this, of course, would not be to save you money, but to maximize the amount of profit that could be extracted from each transaction with you. And if there was a way to do this instantly, so much the better.

Dynamic AI Pricing

There is a way, potentially, to do this instantly and it's called AI. Moreover, there were allegations that Delta Airlines would be the first company to roll out AI based "personal pricing" since it planned to use AI pricing technology from the company, Fetcherr.

In fact, Fetcherr features Delta's logo on its website, seemingly confirming the relationship with the company.

Fetcherr's AI pricing system, seemingly, is not as refined and invasive as the theoretical advanced version of the technology, that is described above, could someday become. 

In a fairly detailed breakdown of how it's system work, Fetcherr described a hypothetical example of how their system works.

"Picture a real-world scenario: A major sporting event gets canceled, a competitor drops their prices, and a weather system threatens to disrupt flights - all within the same hour. Traditional systems would struggle to respond to even one of these events effectively. AI-driven dynamic pricing handles all three simultaneously, adjusting prices across your entire network before you've even finished reading about the first incident."

Delta Airlines Controversy

This is clearly not yet the dystopian version of dynamic AI pricing, but some Senators wanted answers anyway. Three Democrat Senators, Ruben Gallego, Mark Warner and Richard Blumenthal, had said they believed that AI dynamic price would “likely mean fare price increases up to each individual consumer’s personal ‘pain point.’”

That, indeed, is the dystopian vision described earlier in this article, and it certainly could come into being in the not too distant future. But, again, it doesn't seem to reflect Delta's current actual plans and Fetcherr's capabilities. 

In fact, in a letter responding to the Senators' concerns, Delta denied that it intended to inflict on flyers the worst-case scenario outlined by the senators.

According to NBC News, Delta told the senators: "There is no fare product Delta has ever used, is testing or plans to use that targets customers with individualized prices based on personal data.” Delta continued: “Our ticket pricing never takes into account personal data.”

That seems to align with technological reality for now. 

In the future, who knows.