OK, Stan. Seemingly the list is working well. By the way, I want to
thank you about the contents you sent me off line a few weeks ago. See
for instance the risks of the "algorithmic society" (see below). Quite
intriguing a piece...
best
---Pedro
Stanley N Salthe escribió:
I am having problems communicating with lists, So I am trying to see
if this gets through.
STAN
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http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21128260.400-game-developer-beware-algorithms-running-your-life.html?
New Scientist 2826 <http://www.newscientist.com/issue/2826>, 22 August 2011
*Game developer: Beware algorithms running your life*
by Alison George
/Our decisions, our culture, even our physical landscapes are being
shaped by computer algorithms, says *Kevin Slavin*. He tells *Alison
George* why we should be worried/
*You claim that our lives are ruled by algorithms. In what way?*
Put simply, an algorithm is a set of instructions that a computer uses
to make a decision about something. They are like an invisible
architecture that underpins almost everything that's happening. The way
Wal-Mart prices its goods, the movies you rent on Netflix, the contours
of the car you drive - they can all be traced back to an algorithm.
Seventy per cent of trading in the US stock market is "algotrading" -
executed autonomously by computer algorithms.
*Why should we be worried about this?*
The pernicious thing about algorithms is that they have the mathematical
quality of truth - you have the sense that they are neutral - and yet,
of course, they have authorship. For example, Google's search engine is
composed entirely of fancy mathematics, but its algorithms, like
everybody's, are all based on an ideology - in this case that a page is
more valuable if other pages think it's valuable. Each algorithm has a
point of view, and yet we have no sense of what algorithms are, or even
that they exist.
*You believe that algorithms are starting to shape our culture. How so?*
Take Netflix, which is used by 20 million people to rent and watch
movies. Of the movies rented in the US, 60 per cent are chosen because
Netflix recommended them. It does this using an algorithm
called Pragmatic Chaos
<http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17823-photo-finish-for-the-1m-movie-prediction-prize.html>,
which takes into account other movies you like and how many movies you
rated before you rated your most recent one. The algorithm is taking
ideas about human behaviour and coding them and reinforcing them.
The danger is that such an algorithm can create a monoculture. But this
is not the way culture works - it is actually much spikier, much less
predictable. The movie /Napoleon Dynamite/
<http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0374900/>, for example, always breaks the
Netflix algorithm: people who really should love this movie hate it, and
people who should hate it, love it.
*Why is it so important that we be aware of algorithms' impacts on culture?*
If you know that machine control is part of the picture, you might
behave differently. Once you are aware that most of what you are renting
from Netflix is based on a very specific model of the human brain that
might not correspond to reality, maybe you would start asking your
friends what they recommend - which is what we used to do.
It is also important to understand how algorithms shape what you learn
and know. There's a quiet war in the US between Google and a company
called Demand Media <http://www.demandmedia.com/>, which generates
content that is optimised for Google searches. When Google changes its
algorithm, Demand Media's output becomes worthless until it can figure
out what Google has done and rewritten its content to match.
It used to be that you wrote news for how people read - now it's written
for how machines read. Imagine if we all had to change our handwriting
to a certain style so that computers could recognise it. That is
effectively what is happening, but inside our heads. It is shaping our
expression and behaviour.
*How else are algorithms changing our world?*
They are changing the infrastructure and the terrain. Take New York as
an example. Wall Street became a market centre because this is where the
ships and goods came in. Later, the Western Union building became the
communications hub in part because that was where the telecommunications
infrastructure was.
Today, however, the network hub for Wall Street is in this little town
called Mahwah, New Jersey, because this was the safest place to put the
critical infrastructure - within 10 miles of Wall Street but as far as
possible from nuclear power plants, geological fault lines and flight
paths. All the buildings going up in the area house and refrigerate the
servers that run the algorithms - there are basically no people in these
buildings. They are constructed entirely for network topology.
*So algorithms are influencing the planning of towns and cities?*
Yes, because the speed at which they operate is core to their efficacy,
and speed is determined by proximity to network hubs. If you can make
trades before somebody else, you have a tremendous advantage.
Fibre-optic cables used to be laid alongside railroad lines, but that is
changing because railroads have circuitous routes through cities and
that's too slow for algorithms. It is better to lay them in a direct
straight line. One company, called Spread Networks
<http://www.spreadnetworks.com/>, has done just that, building a
1300-kilometre straight-line network connection from New York to
Chicago, just to shave milliseconds off trades between these two markets.
*Tell me more about these financial algorithms. Presumably they are top
secret and very valuable...*
Yes, but occasionally they leak. One of Goldman Sachs's algorithms
leaked and was in the wild. They had to do a whole investigation to
figure out how that happened.
*Can algorithms get out of control?*
Here's an example. A postdoc wanted to buy a copy of a developmental
biology textbook called /The Making of a Fly/ on Amazon. There were 17
copies for sale, starting at $40, but two copies were priced at $1.7
million. When he checked later, the price was $27 million. He tried
to work out what was going on <http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358>.
Basically, two pricing algorithms had got caught in a loop, multiplying
the existing price by 1.3 and offering it again. Because algorithms have
the logic to raise the price but not the common sense to recognise the
value, they just kept escalating.
*I guess it wouldn't be so funny if financial algorithms behaved in the
same way.*
Right. This was just a pricing algorithm, but the ones used in Wall
Street are not only determining the price, they are also executing
against it. The Amazon one is harmless because there is still a human on
the buying end saying: "That's crazy, I'm not going to spend $27 million
on a book!" But if an algorithm were buying the book, which is the case
on Wall Street, the price would keep going up until it reached the limit
set by the system.
*Has this ever happened?*
There was this thing called the Flash Crash
<http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2011/07/high-speed-trading-algorithms.html> on
6 May 2010, where suddenly 9 per cent of the US stock market disappeared
in a couple of minutes. One theory is that when one algotrader executed
an unusually large trade, all the high-frequency algorithms tore it
apart and kept selling and re-selling to each other, throwing the market
into chaos.
*Some people might think you are being alarmist about the risks of
algorithms.*
I am not saying that algorithms don't have immense value. But I think
it's important to understand that something invisible is happening all
around us. I don't think it's the end of the world, but I think it needs
to be stated in extreme terms to make it visible.
*How extreme could it get?*
In the science fiction version of this, my friend Russell Davies
proposed that it's 1000 years from now, there are no humans left and no
companies, but computer controlled algorithms are still trading on a
stock market that ran out of stock long ago.
Profile
*Kevin Slavin* is co-founder of the New York-based game
developer Area/Code <http://areacodeinc.com/> (now Zynga NY). He taught
urban computing and design at New York University, and gave a talk, "How
algorithms shape our world", at the TED Global meeting in Edinburgh, UK,
in July. You can see it here
<http://www.ted.com/talks/kevin_slavin_how_algorithms_shape_our_world.html>
--
-------------------------------------------------
Pedro C. Marijuán
Grupo de Bioinformación / Bioinformation Group
Instituto Aragonés de Ciencias de la Salud
Avda. Gómez Laguna, 25, Pl. 11ª
50009 Zaragoza, Spain
Telf: 34 976 71 3526 (& 6818) Fax: 34 976 71 5554
pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es
http://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/
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