All this algorithm stuff is kinda bizarre I think. It’s weird to think that a code on a computer can control so much…and it’s kinda scary. One of the videos was saying how we do all this work to connect a wire from New York to Chicago so that an algorithm can do something a little faster than another…but to the point that we humans won’t even be able to tell what it did. We just won’t know. How can a mathematical equation control so much? I know that I am stupid about this kinda stuff…like it just kinda blows my mind and it’s hard to think about and understand for me…but I just honestly do not understand.
And it’s one thing to have an algorithm that someone creates to see what movies you like to watch best so it knows which ones to promote to you, but what about the ones that humans don’t create? One of the articles was talking about how all of the sudden all these people got blocked from posting their opinions on facebook, but facebook says that they didn’t do it. It kinda just started happening and they weren’t quite sure how to fix it. And one of the videos was talking about an algorithm in stocks I think where like 9% of something (sorry…I didn’t quite understand the details, I understood it to be money though) just disappeared because of the algorithm and no one knew where it went or why it disappeared. It just did. I liked how Slavin put it…we are writing things that we cannot read…and that’s scary to me.
I definitely agree with you that algorithms are scary, and Slavin explained it perfectly. But as scary as it is Algorithms are the future, and they are controlling the information around us. As humans we need to embrace this technology and learn to work with it. I enjoy using a site called StumbleUpon.com it is an algorithm based site that "stumbles" my interests and suggests new sites for me to visit. I LOVE it i have found some awesome sites. That is just one way i embrace algorithms. In many of the blogs everyone talked about how they felt controlled by algorithms, they do limit what we see, but they are always re writable. I think that is the most important thing you can remember when algorithms seem scary, they are re writable.
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