If you’re ever curious what it feels like to live in thrall to an algorithm, ask a YouTuber. In YouTube circles, mastering the “YouTube algorithm” is an arcane art that has spawned countless rumours, blog posts and a mini-industry of marketers and clairvoyants who claim to know what it takes to get a video sucked into YouTube’s recommendation machine.
But as well as being a shortcut to online fame, YouTube’s algorithm is also an axe hanging over the heads of its creators. In May 2018, YouTubers railed against an experimental algorithm tweak that some argued made it harder for people to find their videos. Years earlier, March 2012, when YouTube shifted to prioritising watch time instead of views YouTubers were forced to respond by dragging out their videos, adapting to the will of a system they couldn’t influence or even fully understand. You live by the algorithm, you die by the algorithm.
In 2012, the word “algorithm” hadn’t quite acquired the sinister overtones it has today. Only a year had passed since author-turned-startup-founder Eli Pariser had introduced us to the term “filter bubble,” suggesting that online algorithms were building us too-comfortable worlds where we didn’t have to confront those that were different to us.
Back then, it felt like algorithms would supercharge our needs and desires. They’d help us find more friends, cure more diseases, and buy things faster, and for less money. Over the past few decades we’d watched as algorithms crept their way into our courts, hospitals, cars and sex lives, seduced by the appeal of an all-seeing, objective decision-maker that would eradicate our human foibles. Algorithms were sure to change the world.
Of course, what we didn’t realise is how much they’d change us. “They have learned our likes and dislikes; they tell us what to watch, what to read and who to date. And all the way, they have the hidden power to slowly and subtly change the rules about what it means to be human,” writes the mathematician Hannah Fry in her book Hello World.
Now, we’re getting weary of how algorithms have twisted us all out of shape. Whether it’s online disinformation, discord-sowing social media bots, or shady governments keen to surveill their citizens with algorithms sourced from equally opaque tech giants, algorithms feel like far from the panacea we once thought they might be.
This week on WIRED, we’re going in-depth on the impact that algorithms have on us as humans, and the world we live in. We’ll be exploring what happens when you let algorithms make all your life decisions, find out how machine learning is changing what we think of as literature and revealing how tech giants’ algorithmic gaze perpetuates the ugly prejudices of the offline world.
But we’ll also be looking at the limits of algorithms. We’ll see how London’s streets defy even the cleverest of self-driving car algorithms and meet the ants that are teaching us that even the most complex code only apes what we already see in the natural world. In doing so, we’ll find out how we can carve out a little space for humanity in a world increasingly dominated by code.
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– Google's Image search has a massive celebrity sexism problem
– How AI is radically changing our definition of human creativity
– Why does Facebook recommend friends I've never even met?
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
