Editor’s Note: The USTA website is pleased to present freelance writer Bob Carson and his popular “Outside the Box” features. This monthly series is a menu of outlandish proposals presented with a wink — but the purpose behind them is serious. The views contained in this column are that of the author alone, and do not necessarily represent the opinions or views of the United States Trotting Association.

Bob Carson

Imagine that all of the consumers in the world are on a gigantic mountain, a mountain larger than the Himalayas. Your task is to find a handful of rare diamonds in that mountain. In our case, the task is to find people to participate in some form of harness racing. Where would you start digging?

Entities like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple do this type of task every day, and they do it with ruthless efficiency.

First, you need to realize, as most people do, that these companies know more about you than you can imagine. They learn more about you every minute. They know you from facial recognition and voice recognition. They have a good idea of your religious and political beliefs. They know your health status, finances and personal details — details that include recently taken lessons in Flamenco dancing or restoration of a 1949 Ford Coupe.

Everything you search for is trackable. Your friends, your preferences in food, movies, books, television and hobbies are part of the data set. Very important to the data miners will be where you shop and what you buy. They know every YouTube video you have watched, and on and on. It is somewhat disconcerting to realize that everything you ever searched for and everywhere you have visited is fair game.

Perhaps a more accurate term is fare game because business is the endgame.

How does this new form of commerce apply to ownership and gambling on harness horses? Let us place ourselves in the seat of a new data miner and let us consider how they harvest information and use the data to find new players.

If for some strange reason, one of these internet behemoths decided that it was in their interest to find harness racing players, or if harness racing hired them to do the task, they would begin by chipping away huge chunks of the mountain.

In less time than it used to take a salesperson to find a phone number on his Rolodex, computers would whittle the mountain with a series of binary choices on unsuspecting citizens like you.

If you do not have enough financial power, you disappear from the mountain.

If you do not have a psychological profile that proves you are a risk taker, you vanish.

If you never watched a single Kentucky Derby, you dissolve.

In an instant, the massive mountain would be a surprisingly small mound. This is only the beginning. Additional mining will take place that will shrink this mound to a shoebox of priceless diamonds.

Do you have any equine friends?

Do you, or does someone in your family, enjoy horses?

Do you have acreage?

Do you have friends involved in horse racing?

Have you had a barn constructed?

Do you wager on college football?

Are you recently retired?

Are you susceptible to new adventures?

Do you have proximity to racetracks or farms?

This is all rather terrifying, unstoppable, and overwhelming. It gets worse with every new algorithm and liquid crystal. The world, even the world of racing horses pulling sulkies where people wager money on the outcome, changes far too quickly for comfort.

Once upon a time, long, long ago, like 50 years ago, the sport of harness racing barely dug into the information mountain. They opened the door, ran the races and waited for customers. Once upon a time, long ago, like a decade, humans made tentative efforts to dig up customers. Geography and primitive technology made the task difficult.

Today and tomorrow, artificial intelligence will do this job. Machines will whittle the mountains more efficiently and continuously.

Almost unbelievably, not only will artificial intelligence have the ability to identify the handful of diamonds that are susceptible to the charms of trotters and pacers, the next step in this terrifying technological territory is that AI will soon have the ability to create programs to market the product.

At some level, we simultaneously grasp the concept of artificial intelligence but do not believe it will happen.

Our sport is so small, so old, so esoteric, so rural, and so work intensive. Many of our brethren will shrug and believe we will survive in some form as we have for well over a hundred years. They may be correct. Other people believe horse racing is a business where the same forces that forge and crush every other business are in play. They may be correct.

Business, hobby, or both, tomorrow will come. The question is what action can be taken that will improve the tomorrows of our sport. The answer lies in the mountain of customers on the planet. The mountain that holds our hidden jewels is not coming to us. We must go to the mountain and fight for new members on every level using new tools.

The starting point should be spending our scant resources to acquire access to the unknown people who exist in that mystical mountain.