For the Love of Algorithms

Wired magazine labelled 2017 as The Year We Fell Out of Love with Algorithms. The article goes on to talk about how algorithms give us filter bubbles, affect elections, propagate biases and eliminate privacy. The article at the end argues that we shouldn't blame the algorithm but the people and companies behind them. Every day algorithms decide what music we listen to, what posts we see on Facebook and Twitter, how we should drive from point A to point B, what products we should buy. Algorithms feed my nostalgia in Facebook and Google Photos showing me what once was. Algorithms recognize my voice and my face. We've even created new currencies from algorithms. Algorithms form the backbone of the top six world's largest public companies (Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook and Tencent). It's been a long time since I only trusted algorithms to format my papers. Algorithms have taken over nearly every aspect of our lives and our economy. With new machine learning techniques, no longer can the creator of an algorithm fully understand how algorithms work. But we aren't in a Skynet world, algorithms are not sentient and not even inherently bad, any more than we label a group of people inherently bad because of a few examples. This societal transition from human-oriented decision to algorithmic decision making will continue and will have great benefits such as much safer cars and medical care. We must be vigilant, of course, to how algorithms will change society, but (in a serious sense) I welcome our new machine overlords.