Algorithms Quotes

“Modernity has become algorithms. Our reality is now intercepted by the exploration and exploitation of our psychic cues that rewrite history by rerouting consumption, elections, public opinion, and civil war.”
― Roger Spitz, The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume III - Beta Your Life: Existence in a Disruptive World

“A new normal is establishing itself in which an undeclared or invisible war is fought entirely through algorithms, narratives, and manipulated media.”
― Roger Spitz, The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume I - Reframing and Navigating Disruption

“When Charles Darwin was trying to decide whether he should propose to his cousin Emma Wedgwood, he got out a pencil and paper and weighed every possible consequence. In favor of marriage he listed children, companionship, and the 'charms of music and female chit-chat.' Against marriage he listed the 'terrible loss of time,' lack of freedom to go where he wished, the burden of visiting relatives, the expense and anxiety provoked by children, the concern that 'perhaps my wife won't like London,' and having less money to spend on books. Weighing one column against the other produced a narrow margin of victory, and at the bottom Darwin scrawled, 'Marry—Marry—Marry Q.E.D.' Quod erat demonstrandum, the mathematical sign-off that Darwin himself restated in English: 'It being proved necessary to Marry.”
― Brian Christian, Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions

“An algorithm is like a recipe.”
― Muhammad Waseem

“The issue is not merely one of false stories, incorrect facts, or even election campaigns and spin doctors: the social media algorithms themselves encourage false perceptions of the world. People click on the news they want to hear; Facebook, YouTube, and Google then show them more of whatever it is that they already favor, whether it is a certain brand of soap or a particular form of politics. The algorithms radicalize those who use them too. If you click on perfectly legitimate anti-immigration YouTube sites, for example, these can lead you quickly, in just a few more clicks, to white nationalist sites and then to violent xenophobic sites. Because they have been designed to keep you online, the algorithms also favor emotions, especially anger and fear. And because the sites are addictive, they affect people in ways they don't expect. Anger becomes a habit. Divisiveness becomes normal. Even if social media is not yet the primary news source for all Americans, it already helps shape how politicians and journalists interpret the world and portray it. Polarization has moved from the online world into reality.

The result is a hyper-partisanship that adds to the distrust of "normal" politics, "establishment" politicians, derided "experts," and "mainstream" institutions--including courts, police, civil servants--and no wonder. As polarization increases, the employees of the state are invariably portrayed as having been "captured" by their opponents. It is not an accident that the Law and Justice Party in Poland, the Brexiteers in Britain, and the Trump administration in the United States have launched verbal assaults on civil servants and professional diplomats. It is not an accident that judges and courts are now the object of criticism, scrutiny, and anger in so many other places too. There can be no neutrality in a polarized world because there can be no nonpartisan or apolitical institutions.”
― Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism

“In an era of predictable unpredictability and untamed algorithms, agility allows us to emerge in the here and now, without sacrificing our longer-term vision.”
― Roger Spitz, Disrupt With Impact: Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World

“Our habits and our fears make our choices. We are an algorithm of ourselves--if you liked that you may also like this.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Gap of Time

“Algorithms are called the aunties. They’re self-organising and so nobody fully understands them.”
― William Gibson, The Peripheral

“We are approaching a soft data catastrophe. Entire lives, from tastes in music and clothes to deepest personal convictions - all produced by networks of feedback between datamining and content recommendation algorithms.

The 'catastrophe' is when these algorithms unconsciously (or maybe, consciously?) lead people down presupposed paths for modern and emerging markets.

Algorithms could right now be helping make people convert to a religion, drug addicts, vegan, LGBTQ, ethnonarcissists, fat, cult members, suicidal, narcissists, atheist, poly, mass shooters...”
― stained hanes, 94,000 Wasps in a Trench Coat

“Google hit such a degree of control in their operation of YouTube that they can tweak the algorithms just right to recommend very peculiar kinds of videos to suit economic and social changes.”
― stained hanes, 94,000 Wasps in a Trench Coat

“It used to be you'd search for something and find tons of good results. Now you type "hamburger" anywhere on your phone or computer and now advertising cartels serve you up some ads for hamburgers for the next week.

Hell just say it aloud near your phone, it'll just take longer.”
― stained hanes, 94,000 Wasps in a Trench Coat

“When I was a kid people used to say one could travel the entire world just by sitting in a library and reading books. Sadly, in the age of billionaire-controlled social media functioning and governing bodies and minds based on carefully engineered algorithms, I don’t believe this is true anymore. The saying should be revised in our times to be ‘one could hate the entire world and see everyone as a villain or an enemy just by browsing through reels and social posts carefully selected to confirm one’s limited knowledge, perspective, and prejudices.’ With that in mind, we need more than ever to master the art of traveling, whether we go near or far. We need to undo the unreasonable, amplified, and exaggerated fear of strangers."

[From “Can We Travel Without Being Tourists?” published on CounterPunch on March 15, 2024]”
― Louis Yako

“Social media itself is a metaphor for people who chase the algorithms set up by society in a desperate search for power, happiness, meaning, and social and financial success. Every social media platform has been a progressively worse social experiment. This is because they were all built according to the existing coercive models we were already living under. None of them has been designed to remedy the problems we had before.”
― Heather Marsh

“Statistics are reliable, but only as idiot demons.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“[...] [A] world increasingly reliant on and in thrall to data. Big Data. Which in turn is panned for Big Truths by Big Algorithms, using Big Computers. But when your big data is corrupted by big silences, the truths you get are half-truths, at best. And often, for women, they aren't true at all.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“There is discrimination, and the opportunities are not equal to everyone. Most countries are blocked from using several crucial features on Google, Amazon, Shopify, AliExpress, and many more platforms that the "internet millionaires" use to get all of their wealth. They are not smarter than you! They simply have access to markets that are blocked to you! When you try to compete inside their markets, the domain owners alter the algorithms to favor people in that geolocation and put them and their products in front of your. I have been stopped from uploading books for no other reason than being in east Europe. People don't believe these stories are true because they don't want to believe they are living in such a world. It's like the story of the Native Americans, who were offered blankets contaminated with diseases to kill them. Now you are being offered a blanket of illusions that gives you lies. And when you say the truth, they call it a conspiracy and hate speech.”
― Dan Desmarques

“One day when we're all dead the algorithms will still be spamming away, sending their junk out eternally across the universe, trying to flog each other control leggings and online guitar courses . . .”
― Louisa Young, Twelve Months and a Day

“Contrary to what many well-intentioned people believe, the fact that we have multiple social media platforms today has little effect on spreading genuinely diverse narratives and perspectives. Social media is not only increasingly in the hands of a few billionaires strongly connected to the ruling class (e.g., Meta acquiring some of the most popular and active platforms), but also the fact that social media platforms operate based on carefully designed and manipulated algorithms to promote the viewpoints of the ruling class in what Cathy O’Neil has called ‘weapons of math destruction’, and what Safiya Umoja Noble insightfully calls ‘algorithms of oppression’, which apply not only to racial matters, but extend to every other matter that is potentially at odds with the desires of the ruling class.”
― Louis Yako

“If we try to standardize happiness… a kind of uniform container for human experience… people themselves will become more standardized.”
― Claire Stanford

“Modern data analysis techniques should embed human rights principles in algorithms making decisions for humans to ensure transparency and accountability.”
― Arzak Khan

“Why isn't my profile correct?"

"Why should it be?" asks Kiki. "Why should it ever have been correct? Regardless of how complex a simulation is, the reality is always more complex.”
― Marc-Uwe Kling, QualityLand

“Welcome to the age of AI, where algorithms grow bigger, and minds get smaller.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The Humanitarian Dictator

“Programs, after all, are concrete formulations
of abstract algorithms based on particular representations and structures
of data.”
― Niklaus Wirth

“For most people, empathy has to be honed. It has to be engaged. It has to be worked on, especially in a world where we’re self-consumed, self-absorbed, self-centered, and entertaining ourselves endlessly with algorithms that have been chosen for ourselves and our desire system. Where is there room for empathy? Where is there room for considering the struggles of others when you’re completely engaged in your own emotional spectrum being triggered by garbage that you let into your face?”
― Marc Maron

“How nice it must be … to be so tired of living
mortally that one dreams of immortality. Like so many other “posts”
(postracial, postcolonial, etc.), posthumanism grows out of the Man’s
experience.”
― Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code

“What’s true of counterfeiting money should also be true of counterfeiting humans. If governments took decisive action to protect trust in money, it makes sense to take equally decisive measures to protect trust in humans. Prior to the rise of AI, one human could pretend to be another, and society punished such frauds. But society didn’t bother to outlaw the creation of counterfeit humans, since the technology to do so didn’t exist. Now that AI can pass itself off as human, it threatens to destroy trust between humans and to unravel the fabric of society. Dennett suggests, therefore, that governments should outlaw fake humans as decisively as they have previously outlawed fake money.[54]

The law should prohibit not just deepfaking specific real people—creating a fake video of the U.S. president, for example—but also any attempt by a nonhuman agent to pass itself off as a human. If anyone complains that such strict measures violate freedom of speech, they should be reminded that bots don’t have freedom of speech. Banning human beings from a public platform is a sensitive step, and democracies should be very careful about such censorship. However, banning bots is a simple issue: it doesn’t violate anyone’s rights, because bots don’t have rights.[55]

None of this means that democracies must ban all bots, algorithms, and AIs from participating in any discussion. Digital agents are welcome to join many conversations, provided they don’t pretend to be humans. For example, AI doctors can be extremely helpful. They can monitor our health twenty-four hours a day, offer medical advice tailored to our individual medical conditions and personality, and answer our questions with infinite patience. But the AI doctor should never try to pass itself off as a human.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“When the algorithms reward outrage, compassion becomes a form of resistance.”
― Lawrence Nault

“No machine dreams of justice. No algorithm dares to imagine a future where compassion leads. That part is still up to us.”
― Lawrence Nault

“Memes have always been kind of like a virus. Whenever you learn a new word, you can think of it as coming into contact with a parasite. Either your guard is up and you reject the word, or it breaks through your defenses and you become a “host,” using and replicating the word for it to reach a larger population. Then there’s the uncanny similarity between how we talk about the ways that words and diseases spread: We say they move through social networks in a “viral” manner, hence the phrase “gone viral.” Many linguists even use epidemiological models to show the spread or lifespan of ideas.”
― Adam Aleksic, Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language

“Internally, we might feel as though the narratives help us categorize our individuality, but on paper they all rely on the same stories. It doesn’t matter how much I label myself: If I’m a demisexual goblincore Gen Z Swiftie, I guarantee there are still others like me. The only thing those labels really change about me is that they make me easier to classify and market to. Ironically, true individuality may come out of a lack of labels and stories, because there’s greater freedom of expression with a blank slate. If everybody’s the “main character,” then nobody is.”
― Adam Aleksic, Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language