2017 Was The Year We Fell Out of Love with Algorithms
02017 Was The Year We Fell Out of Love with Algorithms.
We owe a lot to 9th century Persian scholar Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi. Centuries after his death, al-Khwarizmi's works introduced Europe to decimals and algebra, laying some of the foundations for today’s techno-centric age. The latinized version of his name has become a common word: algorithm. In 2017, it took on some sinister overtones.
Take this exchange from the US House Intelligence Committee last month. In a hearing about Russian interference in the 2016 election, the panel’s top Democrat, Adam Schiff, threw this accusation at Facebook’s top lawyer Colin Stretch: “Part of what made the Russia social media campaign successful is that they understood algorithms you use that tend to accentuate content that is either fear-based or anger-based.”
Algorithms that amplify fear and help foreign powers put a finger on the scale of democracy? These things sound dangerous! That’s a shift from just a few years ago, when “algorithm” primarily signified modernity and intelligence, thanks to the roaring success of tech companies such as Google—an enterprise founded upon an algorithm for ranking web pages. This year, growing concern about the power of technology companies—a cause uniting some unlikely fellow travelers—has leant al-Khwarizmi’s eponym a newly negative aura.
In Februrary, the congregation of digital elite at TED received a warning about “algorithmic overlords” from mathematician Cathy O’Neil, author of the book Weapons of Math Destruction. Algorithms used by Google’s YouTube to curate videos for children earned hostile headlines for censoring inoffensive LBGT content, and steering kids towards disturbing content. Meanwhile, academic researchers demonstrated how machine-vision algorithms can pick up stereotyped views of gender and how governments using algorithms in areas such as criminal justice shroud them in secrecy.