"Malgorithms"
is used by Private Eye (British satirical/political magazine) to highlight adverts auto-generated inappropriately to accompany articles on news etc websites.
Example:
I don't like the implication that it's the algorithm that's malicious rather than the person who wrote the algorithm (no algorithm is inherently malevolent or benevolent in my opinion, it's just an algorithm), but I also know this distinction is completely pointless for the vast majority of people and "malgorithm" gets the gist of what people are getting at across very well.
Perhaps an elucidating counterpoint is an algorithm written in such a manner that it is deliberately worthless, as a joke (e.g., StackSort, Bogosort). Obviously they're not the result of a bad programmer, they're just an inherently bad algorithm.
I actually do though, and I say that as a musician myself. These things are inherently subjective, writing good music isn't just a matter of how closely the musician adheres to a pre-determined set of rules. The qualities of goodness and badness exist in the minds of the creators and the audience rather than being attached to the music itself in some sense. Any attempt to classify "good" versus "bad" music in the sense people usually understand it is just an appeal to authority fallacy, the only thing that makes music good is "do I personally enjoy listening to it or not?". You can try to classify music based on how closely it fits a genre's set of rules but this quickly breaks down into absurdity in practice (for example, acts like the Grateful Dead which span many genres).
That subjective information which describes the badness of a smell doesn't exist within the smell itself, it exists within the mind.
So "Malgorithms" it an accurate one.
Merriam-Webster online says: "a procedure for solving a mathematical problem (as of finding the greatest common divisor) in a finite number of steps that frequently involves repetition of an operation" and "broadly : a step-by-step procedure for solving a problem or accomplishing some end".
And so they always do. The problem that an algorithm solves is defined by the algorithm itself. The purpose of a system is what it does[0].
Algorithms are useful to solve problems for us - the trick is always in making sure that the problem the algorithm solves is the one we want.
--
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
However, it doesn't cover other cases for other AI mistakes you mentioned, like self-driving.
I think so-so automation often is used places where there's a lot of zero-sum conflict between workers and management, or where the work itself causes a lot of negative human externalities. (This can be a good thing: it's probably okay to settle for a "worse result" from an automated system if it eliminates a lot of physical or psychological harm to people...some content moderation issues probably fall under this case, but not this one.)
[1] https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/lure-so-so-tec...
It enabled things like Facebook to displace message boards for the most part. Look at Facebook or Reddit, they are barely able to police obvious noxious behavior in English, and military juntas in Myanmar are able to organize on the platforms.
AI has proven to be terrible at moderating human content, we felt we needed a word for these kinds of buggy systems and have chosen: "
And GPT-J answered:
"LOLPOP"
Which seems to capture the spirit of unreliable AIs pretty well
"Thus, After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd."
It's not a human rights violation if it isn't a human doing it!
It's not just something that happens to us, it's something we do. We need to do better rather than accepting it as inevitable, and let future generations worry about what the best name for it was.
> Maybe there's a ten syllable German word that expresses it perfectly?
That being said, I propose Urteilsfähigkeitsauslagerungsnekrose: The necrosis that follows the outsourcing of our capability of judgement.
May I suggest “yacht-feet automation”? It focuses on increasing the yacht feet of Zuckerberg, and doesn’t do anything else right?
Also 11 sylabels.
Post-reason-delegation necrosis?
But English is always a bit awkward for this sort of thing.
"Blacklist" was banned as term because it was deemed racist. No matter that people understand black and white outside the race issue. So if blacklist is deemed by people , not technology, as racist; thus removing context from the equation, why is AI wrong to assume that "attack the black soldier in C4" is hate speech?
Human interactions have a social/cultural context. You can't just recognise $thing, you have to recognise how $thing depends on $context for the correct interpretation.
Current AI either ignores context completely or doesn't parse it correctly.
It's a rediscovery of the ancient "Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana" problem.
If you're out on a date and you say "Let's go back to mine" it implies one thing. If you say it to some friends after an evening out it usually means something completely different.
Sometimes it means the same thing - but you need to know a lot about the people involved to be able to infer that accurately.
And sometimes humans can't parse these nuances accurately either.
AI-by-grep or stat bucket can't handle them at all, because the inferences are contextual and specific to situations and/or individuals. They can't be extracted from just the words themselves.
Minsky & co researched some of this in the 70s, and eventually it motivated the semantic web people. But it was too hard a problem for the technology of the time. Now it seems somewhat forgotten.
"The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term"
call it maybe philosophy-lacking, or worldview-lacking, but understanding how things 'hang together' in broad terms is precisely what our 'intelligent' systems cannot do. Agents in the world have an integrated point of view, they're not assemblages of models, and there seems to be very little interest than to build anything but the latter.
In the natural world we would call that instinct. So maybe 'artificial instinct' if we want to keep 'AI' or 'synthetic instinct' because I think it sounds better.
"I was using a ballpeen hammer to pound in roofing nails, everything was going great until the hammer's 'synthetic instinct' resulted in a painful blow to my groin and a near fatal three story drop. It'll go better next time - I've painted the ballpeen hammer a different color."
- incompetent system
- incompetent robot
- incompesys
- incompebot
- inept system
- inept robot
- inepsys
- ineptobot
- inepobot
- bunglebot
- hambot
- sloppybot
- careless system
- careless robot
- carelessys
- carelessbot
- neglisys
- negligent robot
- neglibot
I like 'neglibot'. "YouTube neglibotted my video." "This is my new email address. My old one got neglibotted." "The app works for typing in data, but the camera feature is neglibotty." "They spent a lot of effort and turned their neglibot automod into carefulbot. In another year it may be meticubot.
sounds like “artificial intelligence” but really captures the fact that it’s just bad to a harmful extent at what it’s supposedly trying to do.
I can't help but wonder, what the world would look like if services in the future will be provided primarily by AIs. How do we adopt them? Do we have to invent a "New Speech" just to make AI understand us better so we can live a easier life?
"Question: Have you consumed your food today?", "Answer: I have consumed my food today."
Or a more subtle example:
"Hi! Welcome to ___. What do you want to eat today?", "I want to eat item one, fifty-six, eighty-seven and ninety-one", "Do you want to eat item one, fifty-six, eighty-seven and ninety-one?", "Yes", "Please make a seat. The food will come right away!" (all without making any Hmm or Err noise)
this already happens today, with human servers. The menu items are numbered, and you tell them the number instead of the name of the dish.
I already have started add a hard 'ng' on 'going to' because my phone keeps abbreviating it to 'gonna'.
Example is that people always hear 50 when I say 30, because of how I pounce the "y". Anything ending in "th" or "ing" gets confused a lot by people who don't know me.
It's kinda funny to keep track of :)
Did you succumb to the exact same problem GP comment described?
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a man repeating "Hey Thermostat! Can you cool it down in here a little?" over and over–forever.
It's already happened. Have you ever seen an a grandparent unfamiliar with new tech talk to Alexa? There's a ton of them on Youtube.
However this is different from bureaucracy in the level of automation and statistical inference. A bureaucratic system doesn’t do inference (or at least that is not its main function), and the steps between require human inputs (albeit really automated humans most of the time).
I suggest automatacracy which strings together automation and bureaucracy.
Composite noun of verschlimmbessern [1] and Automatisierung (automation).
We are often reduced to mere conformity to what the artificial intelligence can make sense of.
Captcha: "Are you human?"
Human: <Goes on to do a simple perceptual task even a cat could do if they had fingers>
I used to live in a communist country (probably the same one that Mr. Radic lives/lived in), where "hate speech" -- which was called anti-state, or anti-establishment speech back then -- was punishable by a middle-of-the-night visit by dark-clad police. Yet, people still found ways to openly criticize the Party, and there were even popular songs that openly defied them, which only demonstrates that not even human pattern recognition is good enough to detect these things, as you state in your first sentence.
It's a waste of time, but more importantly it is detrimental to society.
Misinformation spreads like wildfire.
The notion that good speech counters bad speech relies on rational, well informed, critical thinking skills that are lacking in a significant portion of the populace.
It is fundamentally different that a company wants to exercise its right to free speech in choosing what is said on its platform than for a government to use free speech as a fig leaf cover for dissent.
Putting up no fight against misinformation and hate speech is not a winning strategy. Society loses much more from nonsense spreading than it does from having to wait 24 hours for high quality chess content to get remoderated.
It’s about silencing legitimate speech that you disagree with, whether it’s on a factual level or other motivations.
Perfect example, coronavirus being manufactured in a lab rather than originating in the wild. Anyone that suggested it was from a lab has been moderated heavily until a report came out that in fact it did.
Was this not damaging to society?
And to your point of hate speech, can you give me a definition of the term? You can’t because there isn’t one that a) covers all scenarios and, more importantly, b) doesn’t cover legitimate speech.
It is up to me to think for myself, not up to someone else to do it for me.
Because if you allow humans to moderate then those humans start acquiring power. Which is something FAANG companies strive to prevent at all costs.
The only way this can make sense - especially on HN - is if the people who advocate for company control of regular peoples’ lives work at these companies.
I think this has the unnatural, unjust and just basic wrongness about using AI to be like humans.
"human-ops" is the justification to remove human pattern recognition because it's better for a small group of employees (e.g. "we cant let our expensive staff view flags of distressing pictures or boring chess videos, so we will get an algorithm instead". The tech companies HR say that this is pro mental health as an additional way to justify this change and any unemployment.
"In modern times, legal or administrative bodies with strict, arbitrary rulings, no "due process" rights to those accused, and secretive proceedings are sometimes called "star chambers" as a metaphor."
Example uses:
"I got starbotted."
"Instagram's automod is a starbot."
"YouTube is too starbotty for your lectures. Better post with your school account."
"We're suing them because their starbot took down our site right after our superbowl ad ran."
"Play Store starbotted release 14 so we cut a dupe release 15. How much will it cost to push the ad campaign back 2 weeks?"
"We use Gmail and Google Docs but not Google Cloud because of the starbots."
"I tried to put Google ads on it, but their starbot rejected the site because it doesn't have enough pages. It's a single-page JavaScript utility." (This is my true story about https://www.cloudping.info )
"Our site gets a lot of traffic but we don't use Google ads because of the starbot risk. Nobody needs that trouble."
"The STAHP Bill (Starbot Tempering by Adding Humans to Process) just passed the Senate! Big Tech is finally getting de-Kafka'ed. About f**ing time."
'Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.'
As for terminology that captures society’s general over reliance on automation and algorithms to handle things that really ought to have direct human intervention, I like Rouvroy’s “algorithmic governmentality”
https://daedtech.com/how-developers-stop-learning-rise-of-th...
Oh and the current administration won’t pass legislation restricting your platforms or revoking article 230.
Rechenunmenschtauglichkeitsempfindung!
/ex-germanist :-)
There's no reason YT can't detect chess from hate speech if they updated their training set. Maybe they weren't aware of this failure case, or they didn't get to fix it, or by trying to fix it they caused more false negatives. The way they assign cost to a false positive vs a false negative is also related.
Machine error; Machine learning error; AI error; AI fail.
Tbh, so do people. Somebody whos not familiar with chess or board games could think the same thing
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Receiver_operating_characteris...
* you, a programmer who coded something that caused company X to lose Y dollars because of a "mistake", have to be on a hook for Y dollars.
* you, a manager who managed a project that caused a company X to lose Y dollars because of a "mistake" by your programmer, have to be on a hook for Y dollars.
* you, a product owner who accepted the what the manager of ta project that caused a company X to lose Y dollars because of a "mistake" by your programmer, have to be on a hook for Y dollars.
* you, the CEO of the company that had a product owner who accepted the what the manager of ta project that caused a company X to lose Y dollars because of a "mistake" by your programmer, have to be on a hook for Y dollars.
Yes, I understand that the cost of a mistake is now higher than the loss suffered by X. That's the incentive to ensure that it does not happen because the wives or husbands or partners of the people who would now have to pay are going to ensure that they do not do take that whose wacky ideas and implement them -- wacky ideas are abstract but the loss of nice housing, nice organic food, nice daycare for the kids and nice scholarship fun is real.
Developers need to stop being so allergic to accountability. It's kind of pathetic
That being said, software development and civil engineering are very different in terms of risk management. There are strict regulations around what you do and if you play by the rules, you have minimum to no risk. Even if dozens of people die under a collapsing building you are not accountable if everything you had done was by the book.
Software development, on the other hand, is more like wild west. There are minimal regulations, only best practices. One developer can never know if the end product is free of any errors.
Pilots are a completely different story. The OP was talking about "causing company X to lose Y dollars", not human lives.
Nah, the opposite. Being paid $800k/year is a great carrot. It should come with a stick so fewer people do the cruise control.
You would have to pay CEO salaries since the responsibility lies on developers.
But ... would you then like to work in that area, if you fear every step you make, can be your last?
Do you think there would be much innovation, if the punishment costs are so out of balance?