Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Algorithms Have Already Gone Rogue

wired.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 165 posts

Re: Algorithms Have Already Gone Rogue

#41

Post by saulrh »

nailer wrote: post #37
sp332 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> This one touches on the effects of Uber’s behavior and misbehavior, why capitalism is like a rogue AI, and whether Jeff Bezos might be worth voting for in the next election. I'd prefer 'Why OReilly believes capitalism is like a rogue AI'. Having Wired repeat OReilly's statement, rather than attribute it to him, makes it seem like they're not critically examining a very significant claim.

Why would Wired do that work when they can just recommend that you read the book? Why would you ask Wired to do that when you can just read the book? And why do you believe that you'd find that article any more satisfying than either this interview or the book?

Re: Algorithms Have Already Gone Rogue

#43

Post by pbhjpbhj »

sharemywin wrote: post #36
marcosdumay wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I think you give people too little credit. Nobody can stand passively watching TV the entire day every day of their lives. But even if you aren't, why would it bother you? If other people want to waste their lives on a coach in front of the TV, what makes this wrong?

Assume that the one thing you do best for a job AI/computers come out and do better. How do you recover from that. Especially, if said AI owners decide you only get a barely livable stipend while they keep most of the profits.

Exactly, you have to rely on the "charity" of the Capitalists, which is going to be the worst gamble anyone made since the last time we tried to assume humans wouldn't be greedy and grab all the resources and power for themselves.

These couch dwellers, what are they going to do to protest? They can't strike; if they're completely sedentary then they probably can't even protest without having a heart attack; cut off their VR or sugar-pump for 5 minutes and you can probably get any sort of compliance you want.

Our only hope is that the great rolling balls of flab that develop from these sedentary couch-dwellers who exist only to consume HFCS mixed with palm-oil in a satisfying soup of flavourings, and consume the latest immersive media, can't procreate and the problem sorts itself out. Though I fear we'll be using artificial wombs and the like and so manage to remove any reproductive pressure that might push our race back on course.

Re: Algorithms Have Already Gone Rogue

#44

Post by KirinDave »

mathgenius wrote: post #40
KirinDave wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm not saying the finance system doesn't work, it obviously does, and amazingly well. I'm just pointing out the weaknesses of the system, and these weaknesses could easily cause humanity to walk off a cliff. I also have a finance background. This idea that the system is a kind of message passing is not a "50,000 feet" idea, it actually came to me from writing algorithms to arbitrage markets. There you really are per…

> I'm not saying the finance system doesn't work, it obviously does, and amazingly well. I'm just pointing out the weaknesses of the system, and these weaknesses could easily cause humanity to walk off a cliff.

I actually think the system is fantastically broken and produces nonsensical outputs quite often. For example, it rewards speculation in the absence of measurable outcome but demands measurable value to speculate.

> There you really are performing message passing (think of forex legs.) It's Dijkstra's algorithm.

I think you're confusing a model you use for the reality at hand though.

> Short loops completely screwup message passing.

If short loops screw up your data other than the ways I described then your system lacks idempotency guarantees and has a much larger problem.

If you're that suceptible to replays then your architecture is somewhat antiquated. Even mass market products like SQS and RabbitMQ make it fairly approachable to model a message passing system across a central linearize queue and correct these issues.

If you're not centralizing, then your system needs more sophistication but it is even more important that replays don't cause issues because you're essentially guaranteed to get them.

Don't get me wrong; bugs exist. But it sounds more like design features and flaws you're describing.

Re: Algorithms Have Already Gone Rogue

#45

Post by s73ver_ »

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…

I think you're taking an idealized version of reporting that was never, ever true. Otherwise all papers would be the same, more or less. There has always been agenda pushing in reporting, both in what was reported, and what was not reported.

Re: Algorithms Have Already Gone Rogue

#47

Post by zghst »

saulrh wrote: post #34
zghst wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I believe that you're looking for a very different piece than this was intended to be. This is essentially a summary of the book. I don't know what the motive was, but it's probably something like "I believe that more people should hear these ideas". The treatment you're requesting would likely qualify as a doctoral thesis. The writers at Wired do not have the time, nor is it likely that they have the expertise, to c…

It is a poor attempt to reconcile the authors views within the industry that he exists within outside of the scope of the book. If they want to throw softballs fine. We are more than free to criticize his claims, free of a doctoral thesis, mind you.

Re: Algorithms Have Already Gone Rogue

#48

Post by usrusr »

andrewla wrote: post #35

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. Saying "let's write an algorithm to improve search results" is meaningless; "let's design and implement a heur…

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.

Re: Algorithms Have Already Gone Rogue

#49

Post by s73ver_ »

mfoy_ wrote: post #28
tenaciousDaniel wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

It's quite not, actually. Humans have the ability to see nuance in things. Computers currently don't. So you see things like Google banning developers for innocuous violations of the rules, whereas humans (assuming they were given enough time to properly review) wouldn't give 3 strikes just because they saw the same violation 3 times.

Re: Algorithms Have Already Gone Rogue

#50

Post by AlexandrB »

mfoy_ wrote: post #28
tenaciousDaniel wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Throughout most of history rules and laws were enforced by a combination of "the letter of the law" and "the spirit of the law". The latter being shorthand for the role of human discretion.

Algorithms completely obliterate the latter - increasingly turning previously flexible systems into the equivalent of zero-tolerance-policy schools, where human discretion has no role to play. This is a problem because many laws on the books were written with the assumption that "the spirit of the law" would be a guiding principle when "the letter of the law" is unclear.

As a trivial example of this going terribly wrong, consider Youtube's copyright enforcement algorithms. Copyright was clearly designed with many loopholes for fair use to allow culture to move forward. Youtube's algorithms ignore all of this, changing the effective meaning of copyright on the site from one where the rights of the copyright owner are balanced with the rights of critics, commenters, and other creators to one where the rights of copyright owners are the only ones that matter.

Now imagine this kind of algorithmic enforcement applied to traffic laws, HR rules, or insurance policies and you can see why people might be nervous about "algorithms". Algorithms neither think nor feel and have no empathy. It's the ultimate actualization of the dystopia in the movie Brazil where the world is a cold, unfeeling, bureaucratic nightmare. Except where human bureaucrats at least need to sleep sometimes, computerized ones never rest.

Post reply on HN