Re:Algorithms Are Great and All, but They Can Also Ruin Lives
by notacoward on Wednesday November 19, 2014 @01:11PM
(#8631576)
No, not really. It reminds me of a shirt I saw once:
"Caffeine: do stupid things faster and with more energy!"
Likewise, these new tools enable us to make entire new categories of mistakes based on false correlations etc., and to make them more often. Before, it would have taken a lot of work to cancel thousands of people's health insurance. Just the sheer amount of time and number of eyeballs involved would have increased the chance that someone might have noticed a problem. Now it's just >click< and there's no chance for introspection before the results of bad data or bad analysis are made manifest in the real world. Some gears are meant to grind slowly.
"Caffeine: do stupid things faster and with more energy!"
Likewise, these new tools enable us to make entire new categories of mistakes based on false correlations etc., and to make them more often. Before, it would have taken a lot of work to cancel thousands of people's health insurance. Just the sheer amount of time and number of eyeballs involved would have increased the chance that someone might have noticed a problem. Now it's just >click< and there's no chance for introspection before the results of bad data or bad analysis are made manifest in the real world. Some gears are meant to grind slowly.