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Algorithms Have Already Gone Rogue

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Re: Algorithms Have Already Gone Rogue

#61

Post by kijin »

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 can't ever trust or read people who constantly try to push an agenda, it's disingenuous.

On the contrary, I can't bear to trust people who don't display a clear agenda.

Everyone has an agenda. It's either spelled out, in which case we can clearly see it and proceed to discuss its merits; or it's hidden under a mask of neutrality, in which case it's much harder to notice and counteract. Pretending to be neutral is both disingenuous and manipulative.

Meanwhile, one of the major points that OP makes is that "algorithms" (or heuristics) are the same. All human-made algorithms reflect human biases. Some are easier to notice and counteract. Others are hidden deeper under a guise of neutrality. Either way, it does not help to pretend that there are no biases.

Re: Algorithms Have Already Gone Rogue

#62

Post by jeffdavis »

quotemstr wrote: post #32

Capitalism is the best thing that's ever happened to humanity. The author's ideological bias gets in the way of understanding.

That's probably true over the span of time where what we needed most was capital investment.

I think there's a fair question about whether we are changing modes. "Capital" itself is changing in nature -- not so much about big machines and mass production any more.

Re: Algorithms Have Already Gone Rogue

#63

Post by [deleted] »

ufmace wrote: post #51
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'd say this is what we call a Puff Piece. Something like 80% of all news is Puff Pieces or Hit Pieces on various things. There's not much practical difference between a Puff Piece and an ad, or a Hit Piece and an ad for the opposite side of whatever is getting hit.

[deleted]

Re: Algorithms Have Already Gone Rogue

#64

Post by dcre »

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?

"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."

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.

"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."

Re: Algorithms Have Already Gone Rogue

#65

Post by justonepost »

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…

well, heuristics are made up of algorithms.

Re: Algorithms Have Already Gone Rogue

#67

Post by peterwwillis »

peterwwillis wrote: post #38

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? Aside: people are still comparing AI to a machine that feels, and this is so stupid it boggle…

kosta_self: I think you're hellbanned.

Good point, but that would be a bug in the AI. An intelligent system would see there would be no point in killing humans, so killing the humans would defeat the purpose of making the paperclips, and the humans support the machine, thus killing them would be counter-productive to its purpose.

It's also unrealistic that algorithms would try to exceed the limitations of their system. Imagine if a natural predator tried to "maximize production" of killing its prey: it would run out of prey, starve, and die. An AI would understand that trying to "maximize production" to the detriment of everything else would be counter-productive and create a resource contention war. Humans are the only creature I know of that exhausts natural resources to its own detriment - we are smart enough to exploit our resources, but too stupid to know when to stop. The natural system's response to this behavior seems to be to get us to kill ourselves. Maybe the AI are part of this process?

Re: Algorithms Have Already Gone Rogue

#68

Post by pdimitar »

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…

Maybe you're looking for PhD thesis presentations and not interviews with book authors, then. YouTube will be happy to help.

Re: Algorithms Have Already Gone Rogue

#69

Post by pdimitar »

dcre wrote: post #64

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? "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…

> 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?

How do you know he's thinking that? The way he was talking, I read him as "well it's obvious that nobody has stopped this behavior so it's fair to assume that not enough people noticed". Wouldn't you agree with that?

> 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.

That was the only part of the interview where I strongly disagreed with him -- and you're right. It's not about ideas; there are a lot of people out there who are extremely good in bean-counting, micro-management, and of course awful at promoting a positive work environment. They will never change. Only regulators can limit them a bit, if even that.

Re: Algorithms Have Already Gone Rogue

#70

Post by gmfawcett »

KirinDave wrote: post #30
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.

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.

Even in that light, algorithms aren't the enemy: models are. If I build a predictive model that harms people, then my model is the cause of harm, not the fact that I built it using random-forest or CNN.
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