Day of the Algorithm

Kevin Slavin waxes part philosophically, part metaphorically about algorithms in his TED Talk.

What are algorithms?

In brief, they’re like an accounting of the patterns that underlie things in our reality. In the film ‘A Beautiful Mind,’ for example, John Nash, well acted by Russell Crowe, is the genius but eccentric mathematician who at one point tried to discern the algorithm of pigeons’ movement. They’re basically mathematical in nature, and once discerned they become a powerful analytic tool.

In speaking, too, of algorithms running amok, Slavin seems to create some horror film, which may aptly be titled, for example, as ‘Nightmare on Wall Street’ or ‘Amazon Does Halloween.’ So if you’re able to get past the confusion over the stuff he speaks about, then you may feel frightened.

Further, as I was following the US Open tennis tournament online one year, I found more stuff on algorithms.

Put in the hands of sophisticated technology (i.e., instrumentation and computing), these IBM algorithms can crunch large volumes of data and do analysis of such breadth, depth and speed, as to be humanly impossible to do otherwise.

What’s more, many of us know that the information search and quick results we get from Google are also based on algorithms that can handle data that far exceed 39 million points.  What you may not know is that the name Google is a ‘mistake’ from the word googol, which is the number 10 raised to the 100th power.  Indeed the former PhD students from Stanford University, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, had a vision for the infinite world of algorithms.  Slavin emphasizes that these are very real phenomena and they have real-world practical applications  and they generate oodles of cold hard cash.  There is reason, then, for CNN Money to refer to Google’s stuff as "the almighty algorithm."

What do I think about all of this?  To be honest, it's awesome and intriguing, and a touch unnerving.  Slavin may very well be right:  That we are creating things that we don’t fully grasp or, worse, don’t fully control.  Since we have a film theme in this article, let me add one more:  ‘Matrix,' which his talk reminds me of, too.  The creators of this trilogy deftly combined cool and geeky.  It is a future where smart machines and sentient robots not only control the small surviving numbers of the human race, but also aim to eradicate them completely.

Is that kind of future truly a part of the human fate?  Maybe.  We don’t know, and will never know, exactly what the future holds for us.  Regardless, I think that Matrix world is several decades away.  So we have plenty of time and opportunity to make sure that we proceed reasonably with our mathematics and technology.  That while we don’t have perfect knowledge, grasp or foresight into anything, we can pay attention to what we’re doing and creating, learn honestly and openly from what is happening, and then be willing to stop or at least adjust our way forward.

Otherwise we will need a savior-hero of the likes of Neo.

Thank you for reading, and let me know what you think!

Ron Villejo, PhD