My only objection to this is a semantic one -- the word "algorithm" is not being well-served here. The correct word for this sort of thing is "heuristic". The concern isn't that algorithms themselves are incorrect, the concern is that the problem they are trying to solve is a heuristic one, not a formal one.<p>Saying "let's write an algorithm to improve search results" is meaningless; "let's design and implement a heuristic that improves search results". The algorithmic part of this is how to efficiently implement that heuristic.<p>I can usually get through articles like this by silently replacing "algorithm" with "heuristic"; the problem arises when some articles attempt to draw equivalencies between "algorithmic" concepts, like running time and space, and "heuristic" concepts, like optimizing for the wrong thing.
The financial system is a giant message passing algorithm. It is pretty much just a min-sum algorithm [1] whose sole purpose is to answer the question "what should we do?". Anyone who has played around with these algorithms for solving decoding problems knows that they are fabulously powerful.<p>But these message passing algorithms have two weaknesses:<p>(A) When there is more than one solution<p>(B) When there are small loops in the message network<p>By far the worst problem is (B): it's a kind of a "corruption" of the network and causes it to pretty much go off the rails. I think people already do understand the consequences of these problems in the financial system, but we don't seem to see how we can just change the topology and/or the messages themselves, in particular, to try to fix up these self-reinforcing loops. Or: move away from min-sum towards sum-product (which often works an order of magnitude better) by perhaps implementing basic income. Etc. Etc.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalized_distributive_law" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalized_distributive_law</a>
Is this his new meme-hustling? "Algorithm"?<p><a href="https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-meme-hustler" rel="nofollow">https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-meme-hustler</a><p>I've never liked how Tim O'Reilly frames his discussion around vague terms like "open" which could mean participatory, transparent, available, or any other number of vague, feel-good terms. Now he seems to be calling "algorithm" things like economic models and government policy.<p>These are widely disparate things, but by using vague terms in different contexts, he pushes discussion towards the direction he wants to steer it: in the case of "open", away from free software. In the case of "Web 2.0", towards anything that involved crowd participation.<p>With "algorithms", he seems to be wanting to push the notion that technology is both scary but liberating and we need tech messiahs like Bezos or Musk to bring it under control.
Can anyone explain why O'Reilly thinks nobody knew until recently that companies are biased toward part-time work in order to avoid providing benefits?<p>"We can’t see, for example, that the algorithms that manage the workers at McDonald’s or The Gap are optimized toward not giving people full-time work so they don’t have to pay benefits. All that was invisible. It wasn’t until we really started seeing the tech-infused algorithms that people started being critical."<p>And here's one that's more subtle, so I don't blame him quite as much, but he is naive to think "ideas" are what cause corporations to act the way they do. Material and institutional conditions cause their behavior, which is then justified after the fact by appeal to shareholder value.<p>"Somebody planted the idea that shareholder value was the right algorithm, the right thing to be optimizing for. But this wasn’t the way companies acted before. We can plant a different idea. That’s what this political process is about."
>We had plenty of bias before but we couldn’t see it. We can’t see, for example, that the algorithms that manage the workers at McDonald’s or The Gap are optimized toward not giving people full-time work so they don’t have to pay benefits. All that was invisible. It wasn’t until we really started seeing the tech-infused algorithms that people started being critical.<p>I’m not sure how this can be said with a straight face. An algorithm was really not needed to perceive this and it’s insulting and strange to suggest it.
"why capitalism is like a rogue AI"<p>These people seriously need to take a step back. At some point you cross the bridge between reporting and actively advertising someone's personal views.<p>I can't ever trust or read people who constantly try to push an agenda, it's disingenuous. Even more so, when reporting, engaging in personal exchange without the discussing data and statistics, i.e. the facts, you are just allowing yourself to become a personal blog of someone else.<p>Reporters are supposed to fact check, look for concrete evidence in someone's statements, hold people accountable to their words, and yet certain people get a pass all the time, even the star treatment.
"I’m not sure that Jeff would make a great president, but he might."<p>So let me tell you about my experience with Amazon Fulfilment. I was gonna pay Amazon, who has this huge expertise in packing and shipping stuff, to fulfil my Kickstarter. I'd made a large, delicate art book. Amazon, in their infinite wisdom, stuffed them in bubble wrap envelopes and dropped them in the mail. They were getting bent, the envelopes were getting ripped up, it was a mess.<p>I spent a month in customer service hell e-mailing someone who was following a script that said I would have to turn on something they called "prep", which would ask them to look at it and package it better. Three times I checked that this was set, and three times I sent myself a test book that came in a bubble mailer.<p>Finally I got clued in that there is a high-level support team that you access by sending a complaint directly to Bezos. This person, after some back and forth, ultimately informed me that due to their internal systems, it is <i>completely impossible</i> for them to put a book in anything <i>but</i> this level of shitty packaging; "prep" is just not a process that can ever <i>happen</i> to a book.<p>They covered shipping my books out to someone actually capable of finding sensible boxes and shipping them. And they intimated that someone maybe lost a job over this. But changing this, they said, might take on the order of years.<p>I'm not sure I want a man who presides over a system like this running the country.<p>Especially given that O'Reilly points out that the "rogue algorithms" of the title are corporations, and the only reason Amazon is headquartered in WA is that the tax was lowest there...
"Our fears ultimately should be of ourselves and other people."<p>Indeed. The short-term fear at least should not be about machine overlords, but about how people in power use AI to increase their power and/or make life worse for everyone else.
Have any of these tech "visionaries" (aka millionaires that we pretend have more insight than non-millionaires) considered that at the same time that we've increased our wealth we've also done more damage to our environment? If the cost of increased wealth is decreased habitat, will peak wealth result in the death of nature?<p>Aside: people are still comparing AI to a machine that feels, and this is so stupid it boggles the mind. The machine that creates paper clips will not kill off anyone who tries to turn it off because it does not have self-preservation, which is a system dependent on fear of death. Machines do not fear, and even if they did they would not fear death, because they have solid state. Bio systems are walking RAM disks.<p>Algorithms are basically math problems. The financial system and government do not work based on math problems, they work based on emotional instability. Seriously. Both these systems are driven almost entirely by the feelings of humans. They aren't algorithms, they are shitty biological systems that don't make mathematical sense at all.
Obviously the most controversial part of this is "capitalism is the first rogue AI" point. I will try to stay out of having an opinion on this, I just want to try to add colour to what he's saying.<p>First, in the classical "market" scenario, we're talking about little atomic firms, each with goals and hopes and dreams of profit. Each of these firms has some kind of "knowledge" and some kind of decision making apparatus. They all have some functionality. In a sense, these firms are like people - so much that our government treats them as such in many cases!<p>In many cases, a lot of these ideas and processes end up being the same, and when it is, we call it collective wisdom[0]or collective intelligence[1]. I won't go too deep into that.<p>So while financial markets and the firms that comprise them aren't exactly _machines_, they do display a form of intelligence different and sometimes more effective than our individual knowledge.<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/collective_wisdom" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/collective_wisdom</a>
[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/collective_intelligence" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/collective_intelligence</a>
> when the curtain rolls back we see that those superpowers have consequences: Those algorithms have bias built in.<p>> That’s absolutely right. But I’m optimistic because we’re having a conversation about biased algorithms. We had plenty of bias before but we couldn’t see it.<p>I must say I am really happy to see that bias in tech is being recognized and accounted for (for the most part).<p>Please forgive the politics (I'll try really hard not to bash Trump ;-) ), but if there is a silver lining to the 2016 US presidential election I think it is that it has really caused many of us to introspect and realize how thick our echo chamber walls have really gotten over the last few years. The chamber was constructed so quickly, I barely realized it was happening. We're becoming so polarized that we're actually moving to different communities to be with more people "like us." Simple awareness of the problem is a huge step forward in being able to resolve it.
It's 2017 and humans have built several anemonae, and we have several highly profitable firms that are built around these anemonae.<p>Their employees act as the stewards (clownfish) more as beings in symbiosis than as one controlling the other. We can neither understand or pull the plug on these creatures. Time will tell which species evolves more rapidly.
> financial markets are the first rogue AI<p>How about this idea: the first rogue AI was <i>language</i>.
In terms of AI as a compositional system for storing meaning, I think this might be a reasonable position to take. Yes people, we've been playing this game for a very long time...
> For more than two decades, Tim O’Reilly has been the conscience of the tech industry. ...he was among the first to perceive both the societal and commercial value of the internet [and] ... he drew upon his education in the classics to apply a moral yardstick to what was happening in tech.<p>Writer hasn't heard of Richard Stallman?<p>Update: writer is Steven Levy, who most definitely <i>has</i> heard of Stallman, and should know better.