Algorithms Have Already Gone Rogue • Hacker News Board

Re: Algorithms Have Already Gone Rogue

#151

Post by platz » Sat, Oct 07, 2017, 5:41 AM UTC

danso wrote: post #143

platz wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Downvoters, explain your logic please

I assume you're being downvoted because you seem to have misread the author's statement and created a strawman argument. He posited that the financial system's algorithm's purpose is to answer, "what should we do?". You seem to have interpreted that as saying that the financial system should answer that problem for society as a whole.

> He posited that the financial system's algorithm's purpose is to answer, "what should we do?".

Yes, That is just re-stating what the author wrote, without providing any clarifying information.

> You seem to have interpreted that as saying that the financial system should answer that problem for society as a whole.

Maybe yes that is a maximalist interpretation; what is the alternative interpretation (it doesn't seem to be present in the author's text)?

> move away from min-sum towards sum-product (which often works an order of magnitude better) by perhaps implementing basic income. Etc. Etc.

Referencing 'basic income' here seems like a whole society problem to me, which has nothing to do with the technical implementation financial payment gateways, no?

Re: Algorithms Have Already Gone Rogue

#152

Post by ScottBurson » Sat, Oct 07, 2017, 8:24 AM UTC

dwringer wrote: post #150

ScottBurson wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, a lot of people use "algorithm" to mean simply "procedure". I'm glad to see someone besides me pointing out the distinction between algorithms, in the strict sense, and heuristics. Complaining about the misuse of technical terms is unlikely to have impact on usage in the popular press ([0]), but I think it's appropriate in a technical discussion. One of the most egregious misuses of "algorithm", in my opinion, i…

Genetic algorithms are algorithms in that they are a description of a specific process or set of processes (which may used in heuristics, or studied in isolation) at an implementation level of abstraction. "Genetic heuristics" suggests heuristic applications, rather than algorithms in isolation, and "genetic search" suggests a specific application, but a "genetic algorithm" can be extremely simple and isn't fundament…

> a "genetic algorithm" can be extremely simple and isn't fundamentally different than an algorithm like quicksort

Ah, but it is. What do you get when you run quicksort? You get a sorted list. What do you get when you run a genetic "algorithm"? You get ... the result of performing that procedure. There's no other formally specifiable postcondition. You certainly aren't guaranteed to get a perfect solution to the problem you were trying to solve. That's why it's a heuristic: if you run this procedure a certain number of times, you might get a useful result. Maybe. And the way it works is by searching a space of possibilities in a certain way. That's not an application; that's the whole point.

Re: Algorithms Have Already Gone Rogue

#153

Post by dwringer » Sat, Oct 07, 2017, 1:16 PM UTC

ScottBurson wrote: post #152

dwringer wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genetic algorithms are algorithms in that they are a description of a specific process or set of processes (which may used in heuristics, or studied in isolation) at an implementation level of abstraction. "Genetic heuristics" suggests heuristic applications, rather than algorithms in isolation, and "genetic search" suggests a specific application, but a "genetic algorithm" can be extremely simple and isn't fundament…

> a "genetic algorithm" can be extremely simple and isn't fundamentally different than an algorithm like quicksort Ah, but it is. What do you get when you run quicksort? You get a sorted list. What do you get when you run a genetic "algorithm"? You get ... the result of performing that procedure. There's no other formally specifiable postcondition. You certainly aren't guaranteed to get a perfect solution to the prob…

I don't understand what you mean about formally specifiable postconditions. Genetic algorithms can have formally specifiable postconditions, they just aren't definable in terms of the problem space to which they're typically applied. The postconditions can be defined in terms of the state of the genetic system. I also am not able to find, anywhere, a formal definition of algorithm that unambiguously wouldn't include genetic algorithms as I outlined them in the above comment.

A heuristic explores a problem in a specific domain. An algorithm specifies a process at a level suitable for machine implementation. Genetic algorithms are, thus, algorithms, though they are typically applied in heuristics to explore real-world problem spaces.

Re: Algorithms Have Already Gone Rogue

#154

Post by platz » Sat, Oct 07, 2017, 4:44 PM UTC

nine_k wrote: post #142

platz wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?". no, no no. To even propose that the answer to the question of "what should we do?" can be solved by the financial system is laughable; that is pure free-market absolutism. The anwer to the question "what should we do?" is _political_ . Let us no…

I'm afraid you read "what should we do" in much more general sense than the original author. I think that algorithm answers a narrower question of "what should we do to optimize monetary resource allocation", and it only answers within the boundaries you set, for instance, trust and reputation play major roles.

Does "optimize monetary resource allocation" include policies such as basic income, that the author referenced?

Re: Algorithms Have Already Gone Rogue

#155

Post by mathgenius » Sat, Oct 07, 2017, 6:05 PM UTC

projektir wrote: post #134

mathgenius wrote: post #56

> financial markets are the first rogue AI How about this idea: the first rogue AI was language . 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...

That sounds a lot like McLuhan's ideas.

Who is McLuhan? Do you have a reference for this?

Re: Algorithms Have Already Gone Rogue

#156

Post by grzm » Sat, Oct 07, 2017, 6:17 PM UTC

mathgenius wrote: post #155

projektir wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds a lot like McLuhan's ideas.

Who is McLuhan? Do you have a reference for this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan

Re: Algorithms Have Already Gone Rogue

#157

Post by pizza234 » Sat, Oct 07, 2017, 6:57 PM UTC

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…

I agree with that.

My critic is towards stating that automation (robots, ai, etc.) causes a loss of jobs in absolute terms, as if in the future most of the people will be unemployed.

There's a radical difference between stating that changes (loss and creation at the same time) in the jobs market will cause disruption, and stating that jobs will be lost and that's it.

Thinking the (r)evolution in nihilistic terms will distract from improving the problems typically caused by the market change (which is the one you mentioned).

Re: Algorithms Have Already Gone Rogue

#158

Post by pizza234 » Sat, Oct 07, 2017, 7:00 PM UTC

s73ver_ wrote: post #58

VincentEvans wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 liv…

Kind of. Middle Class Chinese have had their lives improved quite a bit. Worker class Chinese, well, that situation seems fuzzier.

This may be more or less true, but that's a separate problem from globalization. Due to globalization China got much much richer (to the point of politically bullying other countries due to economical power), but the distribution of the income is an internal problem.

Re: Algorithms Have Already Gone Rogue

#159

Post by crusty » Sat, Oct 07, 2017, 7:01 PM UTC

pdfernhout wrote: post #141

usrusr wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Algorithms running on "social hardware" can be surprisingly formal. A famously well-documented example are early modern witchhunts. The humorous depiction in Monty Python and the Holy Grail does a surprisingly good job at conveying the algorithmic nature.

Along those lines, here are some of my comments on this general topic from an email I posted to the Doug Engelbart Unfinished Revolution II Colloquium in 2000: http://www.dougengelbart.org/colloquium/forum/discussion/012... === ... I personally think machine evolution is unstoppable, and the best hope for humanity is the noble cowardice of creating refugia and trying, like the duckweed, to create human (and other) li…

Just sayin... point me to the person who has the habit of seeing diamonds on the ground and picking them up (and doesn't work in a strip mine). Habits aren't somethings we want - they're somethings we do.

Re: Algorithms Have Already Gone Rogue

#160

Post by ScottBurson » Sat, Oct 07, 2017, 7:33 PM UTC

dwringer wrote: post #153

ScottBurson wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a "genetic algorithm" can be extremely simple and isn't fundamentally different than an algorithm like quicksort Ah, but it is. What do you get when you run quicksort? You get a sorted list. What do you get when you run a genetic "algorithm"? You get ... the result of performing that procedure. There's no other formally specifiable postcondition. You certainly aren't guaranteed to get a perfect solution to the prob…

I don't understand what you mean about formally specifiable postconditions. Genetic algorithms can have formally specifiable postconditions, they just aren't definable in terms of the problem space to which they're typically applied. The postconditions can be defined in terms of the state of the genetic system. I also am not able to find, anywhere, a formal definition of algorithm that unambiguously wouldn't include…

Well, I'll grant you that lots of people use the word "algorithm" in a way that doesn't respect the distinction andrewla and I are trying to draw.

Nonetheless, I believe there is a real distinction here. As it happens, there is a discussion about algorithms textbooks on HN right now [0]. I contend that GAs are not the kind of thing that would ever be described in a textbook on algorithms, no matter how comprehensive.

> Genetic algorithms can have formally specifiable postconditions, they just aren't definable in terms of the problem space to which they're typically applied.

Actually, I think this would be a pretty good definition of the distinction, if we changed "genetic algorithms" to "heuristics". I think if you look at the procedures described in algorithms textbooks, you'll see they all have postconditions definable in terms of the problem space.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15423045