{"id":5118,"date":"2014-09-18T11:06:11","date_gmt":"2014-09-18T17:06:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=5118"},"modified":"2014-09-18T11:07:29","modified_gmt":"2014-09-18T17:07:29","slug":"what-do-algorithms-want","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=5118","title":{"rendered":"What algorithms want"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"abacus\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Here’s another brief excerpt\u00a0from my new essay, “The Manipulators: Facebook’s Social Engineering Project<\/a>,” in the Los Angeles Review of Books<\/em>:<\/p>\n

We have had a hard time thinking clearly about companies like Google and Facebook because we have never before had to deal with companies like Google and Facebook. They are something new in the world, and they don\u2019t fit neatly into our existing legal and cultural templates. Because they operate at such unimaginable magnitude, carrying out millions of informational transactions every second, we\u2019ve tended to think of them as vast, faceless, dispassionate computers \u2014 as information-processing machines that exist outside the realm of human intention and control. That\u2019s a misperception, and a dangerous one.<\/p>\n

Modern computers and computer networks enable human judgment to be automated, to be exercised on a vast scale and at a breathtaking pace. But it\u2019s still human judgment. Algorithms are constructed by people, and they reflect the interests, biases, and flaws of their makers. As Google\u2019s founders themselves pointed out many years ago, an information aggregator operated for commercial gain will inevitably be compromised and should always be treated with suspicion. That is certainly true of a search engine that mediates our intellectual explorations; it is even more true of a social network that mediates our personal associations and conversations.<\/p>\n

Because algorithms impose on us the interests and biases of others, we have not only a right but an obligation to carefully examine and, when appropriate, judiciously regulate those algorithms. We have a right and an obligation to understand how we, and our information, are being manipulated. To ignore that responsibility, or to shirk it because it raises hard problems, is to grant a small group of people \u2014 the kind of people who carried out the Facebook and OKCupid experiments \u2014 the power to play with us at their whim.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What algorithms want is what the people who write algorithms want. Appreciating that, and grappling with the implications,\u00a0strikes me as one of the great challenges now lying\u00a0before us.<\/p>\n

Image: “abacus<\/a>” by Jenny Downing.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here’s another brief excerpt\u00a0from my new essay, “The Manipulators: Facebook’s Social Engineering Project,” in the Los Angeles Review of Books: We have had a hard time thinking clearly about companies like Google and Facebook because we have never before had to deal with companies like Google and Facebook. They are something new in the world, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5118","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-glass-cage"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5118","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5118"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5118\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5122,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5118\/revisions\/5122"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5118"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5118"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5118"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}