Hello World: Being Human in the Age of Algorithms

by Hannah Fry

Among the pilots at Air France, Pierre-Cédric Bonin was known as a ‘company baby’.40 He had joined the airline at the tender age of 26, with only a few hundred hours of flying time under his belt, and had grown up in the airline’s fleet of Airbuses. By the time he stepped aboard the fated flight of AF447, aged 32, he had managed to clock up a respectable 2,936 hours in the air, although that still made him by far the least experienced of the three pilots on board.41 None the less, it was Bonin who sat at the controls of Air France flight 447 on 31 May 2009, as took it off from the tarmac of Rio de Janeiro–Galeão International Airport and headed home to Paris.42 This was an Airbus A330, one of the most sophisticated commercial aircraft ever built. Its autopilot system was so advanced that it was practically capable of completing an entire flight unaided, apart from take-off and landing. And even when the pilot was in control, it had a variety of built-in safety features to minimize the risk of human error. But there’s a hidden danger in building an automated system that can safely handle virtually every issue its designers can anticipate. If a pilot is only expected to take over in exceptional circumstances, they’ll no longer maintain the skills they need to operate the system themselves. So they’ll have very little experience to draw on to meet the challenge of an unanticipated emergency. And that’s what happened with Air France flight 447. Although Bonin had accumulated t...

Steve Talley was asleep at home in South Denver in 2014 when he heard a knock at the door.42 He opened it to find a man apologizing for accidentally hitting his car. The stranger asked Talley to step outside and take a look. He obliged. As he crouched down to assess the damage to his driver’s side door,43 a flash grenade went off. Three men dressed in black jackets and helmets appeared and knocked him to the ground. One man stood on his face. Another restrained his arms while another started repeatedly hitting him with the butt of a gun. Talley’s injuries would be extensive. By the end of the evening he had sustained nerve damage, blood clots and a broken penis.44 ‘I didn’t even know you could break a penis,’ he later told a journalist at The Intercept. ‘At one point I was actually screaming for the police. Then I realized these were cops who were beating me up.’45

Take passport officers, for instance. In one recent study, set to mimic an airport security environment, these professional face recognizers failed to spot a person carrying the wrong ID a staggering 14 per cent of the time – and incorrectly rejected 6 per cent of perfectly valid matches.52 I

As he put it: ‘Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.’23 If you agree with Tolstoy’s argument then there’s a reason why machines can’t produce true art. A reason expressed beautifully 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.24

There’s a trick you can use to spot the junk algorithms. I like to call it the Magic Test. Whenever you see a story about an algorithm, see if you can swap out any of the buzzwords, like ‘machine learning’, ‘artificial intelligence’ and ‘neural network’, and swap in the word ‘magic’. Does everything still make grammatical sense? Is any of the meaning lost? If not, I’d be worried that it’s all nonsense. Because I’m afraid – long into the foreseeable future – we’re not going to ‘solve world hunger with magic’ or ‘use magic to write the perfect screenplay’ any more than we are with AI.