If you awoke this morning feeling a little more tired than usual, you might have glanced at your FitBit to see how many REM sleep cycles you clocked last night. Perhaps you then stumbled into the kitchen to grab an espresso (brewed fresh while you were getting dressed, thanks to a nifty app on your phone). And as you do, your smart fridge announces that you’re running out of milk, so you tell Alexa to add it to the weekly shopping list.

As any Ph.D. student will tell you, paychecks at that level aren’t especially generous. “I was always trying to find cheaper alternatives for household items,” recalls Lim Shi Ying of her doctoral student days at the University of Texas at Austin.

Imagine that you’re a book publisher gathering feedback for a new novel that your firm has recently released. Sales figures are useful, but you’re keen to find out more about what people actually think of the book. So you gather Amazon-style reviews, asking respondents to rate it on a scale of one to five.

For the most part, Henrik Huseby was an average, hardworking man — a small business owner making a modest living repairing iPhones and MacBooks in Ski, a tiny city in Norway with a population of roughly 20,000.