Algorithmic Intelligence Has Gotten So Smart, It’s Easy To Forget It’s Artificial
Algorithms were around for a very long time before the public paid them any notice. The word itself is derived from the name of a 9th-century Persian mathematician, and the notion is simple enough: an algorithm is just any step-by-step procedure for accomplishing some task, from making the morning coffee to performing cardiac surgery.
Computers use algorithms for pretty much everything they do — adding up a column of figures, resizing a window, saving a file to disk. But all those things usually just happen the way they’re supposed to. We don’t have to think about what’s going on under the hood.
But algorithms got harder to ignore when they started taking over tasks that used to require human judgment — deciding which criminal defendants get bail, winnowing job applications, prioritizing stories in a news feed. All at once the media are full of disquieting headlines like “How to Manage our Algorithmic Overlords” and Is the Algorithmification of the Human Experience a Good Thing?”
Ordinary muggles may not know exactly how an algorithm works its magic, and a lot of people use the word just as a tech-inflected abracadabra. But we’re reminded every day how unreliable these algorithms can be. Ads for vitamin supplements show up in our mail feed, while wedding invitations are buried in the junk file. An app sends us off a crowded highway and lands us bumper-to-bumper in local streets.
OK — these are mostly just inconveniences. But they shake our confidence in the algorithms that are doing more important work. How can I trust Facebook’s algorithms to get hate speech right when they’ve got other algorithms telling advertisers that my interests include The Celebrity Apprentice, beauty pageants and the World Wrestling Entertainment Hall of Fame?
It’s hard to resist anthropomorphizing these algorithms — we endow them with insight and intellect, or with human frailties like bad taste and bias. Disney actually personified the algorithm literally in their 2018 animated movie Ralph Breaks the Internet, in the form of a character who has the title of Head Algorithm at a video-sharing site. She’s an imperious fashionista who recalls Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada, as she sits at a desk swiping through cat videos and saying “no,” “no,” “yes.”
Tech companies tend to foster that anthropomorphic illusion when they tout their algorithms as artificial intelligence or just AI. To most people, that term evokes the efforts to create self-aware beings capable of reasoning and explaining themselves, like Commander Data ofStar Trekor HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
That was the aim of what computer scientists call “good old-fashioned” AI.
