Kindle Notes & Highlights
“Behold the Almighty Algorithm, a snippet of computer code coming to stand for a Higher Authority in our secular age, a sort of god,” says Christopher Lydon, former New York Times journalist and host of the Radio Open Source show. And indeed, algorithms are taken to be some form of higher authority when they are used to organize political campaigns, follow our traces in the online realm, shadow our shopping and target us with advertising, suggest dating partners, or monitor our health.1
There is definitely a sense in which algorithms are a sort of god. They are mostly held unaccountable, like gods; things happen, not because of human agency, but because they were decided by an algorithm, and the algorithm sits beyond the pale of responsibility.
But there is also a sense in which algorithms are nothing like gods, although we often lose sight of it. An algorithm does not produce its results by an act of revelation. We know exactly the rules that it follows and kinds of steps it takes. No matter how wonderful the outcome, it can always be traced back to some elementary operations. To people who are newcomers to algorithms, it may come as a surprise how elementary these may be. That is not to besmirch algorithms; seeing how something really works may take out some part of its mystique. At the same time, understanding how something works
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You could be tempted to think that algorithms are something that we do with computers, but this would be wrong. It is wrong because we had algorithms long before we had computers. The first-known algorithms date back to ancient Babylon.2 It is also wrong because algorithms are not about problems that have to do with computers. Algorithms are about doing something in a specific way, following some kind of steps. That is somewhat vague. You may ask, What kind of steps? What specific way? We can dismiss all vagueness, and give a precise mathematical definition of what an algorithm is and what it
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