Hello World: How to be Human in the Age of the Machine

by Hannah Fry

the best place to hide a dead body is on the second page of Google search results.

Google joke

It’s like the saying among airline pilots that the best flying team has three components: a pilot, a computer and a dog. The computer is there to fly the plane, the pilot is there to feed the dog. And the dog is there to bite the human if it tries to touch the computer.

Funny saying

ZUCK: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard ZUCK: Just ask. ZUCK: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses … [REDACTED FRIEND’S NAME]: What? How’d you manage that one? ZUCK: People just submitted it. ZUCK: I don’t know why. ZUCK: They ‘trust me’ ZUCK: Dumb fucks

Mark Zuckerberg

‘The more predictable the decisions get, the less room there is for the art of advocacy.’

Esto es muy fuerte

‘Things that look like autonomous systems are actually systems in which the world is constrained to make them look autonomous.’

Now, a well-tuned algorithm should be built so that it can take account of the tactics being used by the police. There are ways, theoretically at least, to ensure that the algorithm doesn’t disproportionately target particular neighbourhoods – like randomly sending police to medium-risk areas as well as high-risk ones. But, unfortunately, there’s no way to know for sure whether PredPol is managing to avoid these feedback loops entirely, or indeed whether it is operating fairly more generally, because PredPol is a proprietary algorithm, so the code isn’t available to the public and no one knows exactly how it works.

Propietary software

As Mark Twain says: There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations. We keep on turning and making new combinations indefinitely; but they are the same old pieces of colored glass that have been in use through all the ages.

Mark Twain "New ideas"

‘Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.’

Tolstoi "Art"

by Douglas Hofstadter, years before he encountered EMI: A ‘program’ which could produce music … would have to wander around the world on its own, fighting its way through the maze of life and feeling every moment of it. It would have to understand the joy and loneliness of a chilly night wind, the longing for a cherished hand, the inaccessibility of a distant town, the heartbreak and regeneration after a human death. It would have to have known resignation and world-weariness, grief and despair, determination and victory, piety and awe. It would have had to commingle such opposites as hope and fear, anguish and jubilation, serenity and suspense. Part and parcel of it would have to be a sense of grace, humour, rhythm, a sense of the unexpected – and of course an exquisite awareness of the magic of fresh creation. Therein, and only therein, lie the sources of meaning in music.

Hofstader "Creating Art"

Perhaps the answer is to build algorithms to be contestable from the ground up. Imagine that we designed them to support humans in their decisions, rather than instruct them. To be transparent about why they came to a particular decision, rather than just inform us of the result.

Purpose