The spam filter works because only you can see the scores of the emails. If the rules of Google search and Youtube were more transparent, spammers would always be one step ahead of spam detection, so everyone would lose in the end.

This is false. Spammers can and do test their own emails against spam filters. And the less transparent ones, like Gmail's often suffer longer failures to detect new strategies spammers are using.

There are enough unique filters that a spammer cannot hope to account for them all in a timely manner. Getting .001% of spam emails past Gmail's filters is much more efficient than getting 100% of emails past my personal Thunderbird spam filter.

That's a valid argument for not using Gmail, but that in the case of Youtube, almost everyone wants a single place where they can watch all the user-generated videos.

> almost everyone wants a single place where they can watch all the user-generated videos

I have my doubts this is true, so much as people are used to the relatively common controls/experience that comes with clicking a YouTube link. If I gave you a link to ocdtrekkietube.com/s8fsj2 (not a real link), and it worked as well as YouTube, I'm not sure any user would be particularly upset about it.

The biggest reason YouTube is as powerful as it is is that video hosting is expensive and few companies can eat that kind of bandwidth and storage without being an ad giant.

We're talking about Youtube's recommendation algorithms here, not their video hosting. Imagine if Youtube hosted the same videos, but provided no homepage, recommendations, or search engine. People would still gravitate towards a single source where they can watch all the content they want. There may be some more competition, such as a liberal recommendation engine, a conservative one, and one for teenagers. However, these websites/apps would likely face all the same problems that Youtube does today.

My iphone indexes photos and labels all the ones with dogs in it. I don't care how this system works and likely the answer is some black box NN. Why should this system be shut down when it causes no harm and works pretty well?

> Why should this system be shut down when it causes no harm and works pretty well?

You believe it causes no harm, but that doesn't make for a good assumption, considering image recognition NNs have been repeatedly demonstrated to be racist. So you may find it's classification of dogs might work really well, but it might label other people's coworkers or family members as dogs.

I still don't see why I should care since its only for my personal use. I agree in other areas like law enforcement and news curation this is an issue but for my personal photo search all I care about is that it works pretty well, which it does. Some mistakes are fine here.

Which is my main point, why should this apply to all tech when in some cases unexplainable mistakes are fine?

In many cases making a neural network explainable is literally impossible. Logic based AI failed in the 90s and only though neural nets have we gotten to human and superhuman level advances. If you want explainability it's going to require giving up a lot of innovation that could help people. Especially when we ourselves can't explain our own behavior psychologically.

> In many cases making a neural network explainable is literally impossible.

Then it should be illegal to use on consumer websites. It's that simple.

> If you want explainability it's going to require giving up a lot of innovation that could help people.

Four people died in the US Capitol because of this "innovation". It's time to stop pretending technology doesn't cause more harm than good in these cases.

I don't like when people try to stop or slow down technological innovation. Technologies are just tools, a nuclear bomb could just as easily have been made into a nuclear power plant. But to fully restrict them shows a lack of foresight. Yes, recommender systems can be used for bad, as yesterday, but they can also be good.

It's likely unrestricted technological innovation will inevitably cause the end of the human species, and your own example demonstrates why: In our rush to create the nuclear bomb, several times we came close to obliterating all life on earth due to simple mistakes. Several times, the hesitation of one man was the only thing that prevented our planet's complete annihilation.

The nuclear bomb is exactly why we need to block "innovation" that causes more harm than good.

And yet nuclear energy is one of the highest latent energy sources we have, orders of magnitude above solar, wind, coal and so on. If we blocked progress, then we'd have never discovered this.

The question is, how do you know something is bad before developing it? You oftentimes can't put the genie back in the bottle.