It’s all in the algorithms
OPINION —
I woke up, staggered from my bedroom and made coffee. I pulled out my phone and commenced to scroll social media. On my screen, [there was] a young woman, in pajamas, dancing in her kitchen. She was maybe mid twenties, with a pierced nose, and extremely hairy armpits.
I wiped sleep from my eyes and tried to understand what I was looking at.
It was early in the morning. My brain could not piece together why my newsfeed was showing me feminine armpit hair first thing in the morning.
Who was this unshaven woman? Why was she dancing in her kitchen as opposed to, say, her bathroom? Why do people post dance videos on social media? And more importantly, why is this video on my news feed?
This young woman is a stranger to me. We are not Facebook friends. I’ve never seen her before in my life. Of this I am certain; I never forget an armpit.
Thus, I can only assume the bushy dancer is on my news feed because of AI algorithms.
Which is probably why the next video on my news feed depicted Japanese men and women on a Japanese game show, sliding down a waterslide into a vat of whipped cream. But at least their pits weren’t visible.
I remember when I first signed up for social media. Back then, we didn’t have algorithms or AI selecting what was in our news feed. In fact, we didn’t even call it “social media.” We called it “wasting time.”
In those days, you fired up your PC with a ripcord, lawn-mower-style, then you used dial-up internet that took four or five years to connect.
Facebook was still in its infancy, and was still an important application many middle-aged people used to discover whether or not their high school sweethearts had gotten fat.
The main function of social media in those days was posting stuff. It was good clean fun. You’d make a clever post, whereupon the only people to comment were your aunts and uncles, at which point you’d end up blocking all your insane family members and nobody would talk to you at the following Thanksgiving.
But now we have algorithms.
The algorithms are doing everything now. You interact with algorithms every day in the modern world. Whenever you apply for a mortgage, or a job, buy something on Amazon, stream a movie, watch TV, adjust your thermostat, you are using an algorithm.
The scary thing is, a lot of algorithms make decisions for us. In our current society, algorithms are now driving cars, mowing lawns, making investments, setting insurance premiums, writing emails, prescribing medicine, and telling your robot vacuum to avoid the dog poop in your living room.
In a recent study, one expert said: “Computer algorithms are making us more advanced, and they’re getting smarter. They are making decisions for us, every day. Decisions we’re incapable of making. They’re leading us into a new age.”
It’s too bad mankind didn’t have the algorithms to “lead” him out of the Stone Age. A computer would have likely told cavemen to reject usage of fire because it was “unpredictable” and “hard to control.”
Thus, we would have never discovered the wheel. We would have never learned agriculture. If our ancestors would have trusted algorithms, we’d still be stuck in a primitive world. There would be no art, no music, and right now we’d all be going around with hairy armpits.
Wait.
Sean Dietrich is a columnist, novelist and stand-up storyteller known for his commentary on life in the American South. His column appears in newspapers throughout the U.S. He has authored 15 books.
