The Tyranny of Algorithms
Do we want a world where a software program picks the next pop-music star and legal systems run on opaque pieces of code?
By EVGENY MOROZOV
"In "Player Piano," his 1952 dystopian novel, Kurt Vonnegut rebelled against automation. For Vonnegut, the metaphor of the player piano—where the instrument plays itself, without any intervention from humans—stood for all that was wrong with the cold, mechanical and efficiency-maximizing environment around him.
Vonnegut would probably be terrified by Christopher Steiner's provocative "Automate This," a book about our growing reliance on algorithms. By encoding knowledge about the world into simple rules that computers can follow, algorithms produce faster decisions. A gadget like a player piano seems trivial in comparison with Music Xray, a trendy company that uses algorithms to rate new songs based on their "hit-appeal" by isolating their patterns of melody, beat, tempo and fullness of sound and comparing those with earlier hits. If the rating is too low, record companies—the bulk of Music Xray's clientele—probably shouldn't bother with the artist."
No comments:
Post a Comment