Hello World: Being Human in the Age of Algorithms

by Hannah Fry

‘Hello world’ is a reminder of a moment of dialogue between human and machine.

There are thousands and thousands of details within thousands and thousands of categories and files stored on hidden servers somewhere, for virtually every single one of us.

They have made your most personal, private secrets into a commodity.

Free technology in return for your data and the ability to use it to influence and profit from you. The best and worst of capitalism in one simple swap.

the deal

At the beginning, your neural network is a complete pile of junk. It starts with no knowledge – no idea of what is or isn’t a dog. All the dials and knobs are set to random. As a result, the answers it provides are all over the place – it couldn’t accurately recognize an image if its power source depended on it. But with every picture you feed into it, you tweak those knobs and dials. Slowly, you train it.

AI image gen

This is another ‘machine-learning algorithm’, like the random forests we met in the ‘Justice’ chapter. It goes beyond what the operators program it to do and learns itself from the images it’s given. It’s this ability to learn that endows the algorithm with ‘artificial intelligence’. And the many layers of knobs and dials also give the network a deep structure, hence the term ‘deep learning’.

An algorithm that works without our knowing how it makes its decisions might sound like witchcraft, but it might not be all that dissimilar from how we learn ourselves.

The algorithm can create poems and paintings as well as music, but – still – all it has to go on is a measure of similarity to whatever has gone before.

The algorithms are undoubtedly great imitators, just not very good innovators.

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.

‘Creativity is just finding an association between two things which ordinarily would not seem related.’

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