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Title: What Algorithms Want

Subtitle: Imagination in the Age of Computing

Author: Ed Finn

Narrator: Scott Merriman

Format: Unabridged

Length: 8 hrs and 55 mins

Language: English

Release date: 02-17-17

Publisher: Brilliance Audio

Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 12 votes

Genres: Science & Technology, Technology

Publisher's Summary:

We depend on - we believe in - algorithms to help us get a ride, choose which book to buy, execute a mathematical proof. It's as if we think of code as a magic spell, an incantation to reveal what we need to know and even what we want. Humans have always believed that certain invocations - the marriage vow, the shaman's curse - do not merely describe the world but make it. Computation casts a cultural shadow that is shaped by this long tradition of magical thinking. In What Algorithms Want, Ed Finn considers how the algorithm - in practical terms, "a method for solving a problem" - has its roots not only in mathematical logic but also in cybernetics, philosophy, and magical thinking.

Finn argues that the algorithm deploys concepts from the idealized space of computation in a messy reality, with unpredictable and sometimes fascinating results. Drawing on sources that range from Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash to Diderot's Encyclopédie, from Adam Smith to the Star Trek computer, Finn explores the gap between theoretical ideas and pragmatic instructions. He examines the development of intelligent assistants like Siri, the rise of algorithmic aesthetics at Netflix, Ian Bogost's satiric Facebook game Cow Clicker, and the revolutionary economics of Bitcoin. He describes Google's goal of anticipating our questions, Uber's cartoon maps and black box accounting, and what Facebook tells us about programmable value, among other things.

If we want to understand the gap between abstraction and messy reality, Finn argues, we need to build a model of "algorithmic reading" and scholarship that attends to process, spearheading a new experimental humanities.

Members Reviews:

Come for the cleverness, stay for the scariness

Trippy stuff. Sure glad it's only a farfetched hypothetical. Wait, it's NOT? This is a painstaking layout of a most probable texture of the future, with our special preserves of being "human" on a very slippery slope? Wow. (Crestfallen, queasy, nauseous, spinning in vertigo.) But it is presented in such a slick meticulous package! All these lovely permutations are laid out by a silk tongued guide like a lovely gutted fish in bio class -- or maybe more fittingly, a noisy fish market with carcasses flung bloody about. This kind of thing I am unavoidably attracted to view, and can't look away from, even though it makes my entrails turn noxious and tunnel toward the center of the earth. Well, I have this cluster of instincts: learn, comprehend, adapt, survive. Devilish thing. I have to plod through stuff like this, like a salmon struggling up a steepening set of adverse waterfalls. What to do? And this book responds pretty brilliantly, scarily. Its moments of reassurance (maybe my cyber-competitor WILL appear as a lovable hesitant Scarlet Johansson, like in that movie, "Her," as explored here?) is small beer. (I note, and the book notes with its fine subtlety , AI will know what I want to see, and present a Scarlett, in a magic, cinematic eternal glow, down to the cute quirks. I guess one could footnote "Vanilla Sky," while we are on movies.) But let me tell what is dawning on me, at the start of my tipping into old-man-hood: reassurance was ALWAYS, forever, small beer. Always provisional and fragile. Sorry folks.