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Algorithms Have Already Gone Rogue

wired.com

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Re: Algorithms Have Already Gone Rogue

#21

Post by sp332 »

zghst wrote: post #11

"why capitalism is like a rogue AI" 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. 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 allowin…

It's just a paraphrase. Here's the quote: "Yes, financial markets are the first rogue AI." I didn't read the paraphrase as an endorsement. It's just a description of what was said.

Re: Algorithms Have Already Gone Rogue

#22

Post by _jal »

wjossey wrote: post #7
Iv wrote: post #2

Sorry but it is hard to take seriously someone who thinks AI and automation won't take away jobs. They will and it is a good thing.

I think it’s important throw an addendum onto that statement. “They will, and it is a good thing. Although there may be some short term downsides we should look to mitigate.” I love to listen to economics podcasts and read economic articles and books in my spare time, so I’m sufficiently convinced that automation is a good thing for quality of life around the world. That being said, there is a real human cost as well…

An important point, but I hope it is recognized that "we" don't do economic downside-mitigation, at least in the US. People said the same thing about NAFTA - they'd fix it in post. I think there were some half-hearted education efforts and a bit of other fluff, but nobody who could actually do anything really cared. You can see this pattern repeated over and over.

I only mean to pick on the US a little; we are worse than some other nations, but the problem is not unique to us. Humans just generally don't mitigate big, looming collective action problems. They ignore it until it happens and then whine that nobody did anything. Or, if it only effects the already-poor, everyone else settles on a narrative that it is their bad morals or laziness or whatever excuse doesn't make people think too hard.

Re: Algorithms Have Already Gone Rogue

#23

Post by banned1 »

zghst wrote: post #11

"why capitalism is like a rogue AI" 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. 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 allowin…

Hysteria sells.

Re: Algorithms Have Already Gone Rogue

#24

Post by jacknews »

"Our fears ultimately should be of ourselves and other people."

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.

Re: Algorithms Have Already Gone Rogue

#25

Post by zghst »

saulrh wrote: post #19
zghst wrote: post #11

"why capitalism is like a rogue AI" 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. 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 allowin…

Yes? This is an interview with an author that was conducted specifically to talk about the book and the material in it. What did you expect ? Unrelated, I'd like to see your argument against that particular line. IMO the comparison is an excellent one; its only issue is that the chosen scope ("the financial market") is too small. Corporations and other bureaucratic entities like governments are powerful cross-domain…

Well I'd hope that we'd expect better when an author makes outrageous, nonsensical claims.

They are rehashing the book instead of analyzing its claims and assessing its validity. Conveniently, the blame of all the issues are left on the firms instead of the rules of the marketplace, conditions, etc which lead to distortions and structural issues in the market.

Re: Algorithms Have Already Gone Rogue

#26

Post by Chaebixi »

tenaciousDaniel wrote: post #10
jordigh wrote: post #3

Is this his new meme-hustling? "Algorithm"? https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-meme-hustler 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. These are widely disparate things, but by using v…

That's been bothering me, the word "algorithm" is slowly becoming known as this ambiguously scary thing.

It's kinda understandable, though. Whenever the services of Google, Facebook, etc. behave in an inscrutable, nonsensical, or offensive way, they blame it on their "algorithm" (for a recent example, see https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/oct/06/youtube-alte...). That's really the only context where the term "algorithm" surfaces in mainstream discussion.

ML has had a lot of successes, but one of its failures has been more unpredictability on the level of individuals and events that people actually experience.

Re: Algorithms Have Already Gone Rogue

#27

Post by VincentEvans »

VincentEvans wrote: post #14
pizza234 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a loaded statement. You could say as well that's it's hard to take seriously those who don't know the lump of labour fallacy.

If you think that models that are used to think about economy in aggregate somehow act as a guarantee that a life of an individual will not be wrecked as a result of large-scale automation.... well, lets discuss "lump of labor fallacy" when a former truck driver is "replacing" his job with 3 gig-economy part time jobs that sprung out as result of the "expanding economy". It's not that those models are wrong, it's tha…

To add to this, a bit: Our present political kerfuffle is no small way caused by collective feeling of anger by population who have seen their (industrial, mining, farming) jobs in rural america disappear due to globalization, while the market expanded .... elsewhere. In New York, in San Fran, in China, in India. And the money from that expansion did not go anywhere near those affected.

But the upside is how much lives of Chinese have improved, so they got that going for them, which is nice.

Re: Algorithms Have Already Gone Rogue

#28

Post by mfoy_ »

tenaciousDaniel wrote: post #10
jordigh wrote: post #3

Is this his new meme-hustling? "Algorithm"? https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-meme-hustler 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. These are widely disparate things, but by using v…

That's been bothering me, the word "algorithm" is slowly becoming known as this ambiguously scary thing.

An "algorithm" is simply a way to do a thing based on a set of rules to be followed... of course it's ambiguous.

Getting scared of anything that generic is silly. Might as well fear the outside because anything can happen out there!

Re: Algorithms Have Already Gone Rogue

#29

Post by KirinDave »

mathgenius wrote: post #13

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. But these message passing algorithms have two weaknesses: (A) When there is more than one solution (B) When there are small l…

Having worked in the financial industry, your view of it is what we'd call, "50,000" feet.

I don't think it reflects reality on the ground, nor does it really reflect how humans in groups make decisions according to research.

The message network loop issue isn't even an issue for message passing systems except in the most pathological cases (where it results in an unbounded growth in messages or an infinite delta on the values the algorithm calculates.

Re: Algorithms Have Already Gone Rogue

#30

Post by KirinDave »

tenaciousDaniel wrote: post #10
jordigh wrote: post #3

Is this his new meme-hustling? "Algorithm"? https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-meme-hustler 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. These are widely disparate things, but by using v…

That's been bothering me, the word "algorithm" is slowly becoming known as this ambiguously scary thing.

Maybe if humans took responsibility for the algorithms they created and didn't shrug and say, "It's the algorithm" then "the algorithm" wouldn't be the antagonists in this story.
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