“The problem with societies based on prediction is that there are massive interests in these predictions.”
“Objectivity is always invoked to suppress a kind of error related to the subject… ”
“We believe that numbers represent us but we are told which numbers and we forget that this is just one way of seeing the world…”
The reason we focus on algorithms is partly so we don’t have to think about the wider systems they are a part of. ….
“Whoever shapes the software that distinguishes a threat makes a political or social judgment about what is normal or not normal and they do this very opaque and very much hidden.”
“.. algorithms and how they are updated all the time [..] it looks the same but it does something completely different.”
“Today if somebody says “I don’t make the rules” they really mean it- the rules are made by a machine… We are deskilled, decision, calculation, analysis, and power is taken away from us …”
“We concentrate on algorithms is because we cannot deal with super-complexity…. So we invent Angels to create an unseen hand…
“If you are not on the table you are on the menu… we have to be on the table where these systems are built.”
“…each algorithm has a cultural imprint…”
“Invisible rules? We have more and better technology than ever to make sure they are not just pushing behavior but they are actually determining subjectivity when internalized.”
“…if you want to get at the bias in algorithm, if you don’t know the algorithm it is very hard…”
“…there is not such a thing as non-contextual data…”
“The problem is the values that are designed into the system …humans by default thought of as gain maximizers… in medicine we see every day that people are not gain maximizers…”
“A machine may identify a cat in an image but it does not understand what a cat is…”
“What distinguishes digital platforms from researchers is that meaning is just tied to company goals, like what makes them click more often on the add, or transaction rate… “bounded meaning” ”
“…what physicists are doing in the backrooms of finance firms is winding up as weapons of mass destruction…”
“You never had millions or tens of millions of people synchronously working for a company facilitated through a network.”
“The algorithms are not really going to help you unless they profit the people who are running the algorithm …”
“An environment based on statistics would be a poor thing.”