Words&Dirt

“Elsewhere the world may be blustering or sleeping, wars are fought, people live and die, some nations disintegrate, while others are born, soon to be swallowed up in turn––and in all this sound and fury, amidst eruptions and undertows, while the world goes its merry way, bursts into flames, tears itself apart and is reborn: human life continues to throb.

So, let us drink a cup of tea.”

––The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery, pg. 91

“It is undeniable that AI and machine-learning algorithms have already had world-transforming application in areas as diverse as science, manufacturing, and entertainment. Examples range from machine vision and pattern recognition essential in improving quality in semiconductor design and so-called rational drug discovery algorithms, which systematize the creation of new pharmaceuticals, to government surveillance and social media companies whose business model is invading privacy for profit. The optimists hope that potential abuses will be minimized if the applications remain human-focused rather than algorithm-centric. The reality is that, until now, Silicon Valley has not had a track record that is morally superior to any earlier industries. It will be truly remarkable if any Silicon Valley company actually rejects a profitable technology for ethical reasons.

Setting aside the philosophical discussion about self-aware machines, and in spite of Gordon’s pessimism about productivity increases, it is clearly becoming increasingly possible and ‘rational’ to design humans out of systems for both performance and cost reasons. Google, which can alternatively be seen as either an IA or AI company, seems to be engaged in an internal tug-of-war over this dichotomy. The original PageRank algorithm that the company is based on can perhaps be construed as the most powerful example in the history of human augmentation. The algorithm systematically mined human decisions about the value of information and pooled and ranked those decisions to prioritize Web search results. While some have chosen to criticize this as a systematic way to siphon intellectual value from vast numbers of unwitting humans, there is clearly an unstated social contract between user and company. Google mines the wealth of human knowledge and returns it to society, albeit with a monetization ‘catch.’ The Google search dialog box has become the world’s most powerful information monopoly.

Since then, however, Google has yo-yoed back and forth in designing both IA and AI applications and services, whichever works best to solve the problem at hand.”

––Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots, by John Markoff, pg. 91-2