Life is ultimately math ...
How likely are you to meet the person you need among billions of people?
That is the final answer that the algorithm seeks, a kind of synthesis between the strict calculation, the probability of statistics and personal need, only that its ultimate goal is to find the perfect person for whatever the interest of your planning.
Segmentation of advertising, cookies, connectivity, tracking, selective news, the alienating post-truth as a reality to the taste of the consumer. The spiders or boots have located us, we are a disoriented IP looking for what it needs ... and the algorithm is ready to provide it to us.
Power, that's what it's all about. Whoever develops the best algorithm or who controls it in the best way will be able to govern many of our decisions.
Ed Finn, brand new director of the Center for Science and Imagination at the University of Arizona, is offered in this book to give us many keys to the paradigmatic change of concept of the entire humanity mired in the connectivity of the network.
A kind of AI (Artificial Intelligence) is in charge of providing us with our doses of soma (see Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley), and the agorithm is your perfect tool to find that precise calculation between the emotional of the tastes and the effectiveness of the product.
The network knows everything about us (or at least our IP) and processes our information in the service of each commercial cause. Advertising efficiency turned into graphics that always point upwards.
But Ed Finn also talks about imagination at the service of the algorithm. It is as if Artificial Intelligence, thank God, still requires creative human minds, capable of completing the processing of information with the final push of creativity, the ingenuity that finally assails the user, which generates the conversion of the sale or to guide the decision of any kind, social or political ...
In a way, all of this scares us, our monster seems more and more autonomous and capable of feeding itself. But at the same time, hope hangs over the creative side. An algorithm cannot create a human. A human is the God of agorhythm, the one who can finish giving the perfect color to a sunset, causing two lovers to finally give their first kiss ...
You can buy the book The search for the algorithm, a great essay by Ed Finn, here: