Tuesday, February 19, 2019

The algorithm is so fucking stupid



I had to give up reading non-fiction books about the immediate future for mankind, because all the writers had an ideological hard-on for the algorithm, convinced it was going to run anything and everything in our lives, and that always sounds like pure horseshit.

While they pointed to studies showing Facebook knew more about people than their own friends and colleagues, there's the stink of confirmation bias, because they're dealing with people who gave Facebook everything. Like most people, I threw up a couple of pics, occasionally like something and have gradually used it less and less, and I've always found the social media platform has just got better and better at showing me exactly all the shit I'm not interested in.

Meanwhile, YouTube does seem to have got the idea that I'm not interested in alt-right fuckheadery, and unlike a lot of other poor folk, I somehow have managed to avoid that cesspool completely. But the ads it serves up are laughably off-point - I don't ever need to see another advertisement for Grammarly, because I'm a professional editor who gets paid to sort out grammar for other people, I'm never going to fucking pay for a robot to do it.

There might be a singularity coming when an AI reaches god-like perfection and is able to predict our every thought and desire, but we're not there yet. The algorithm is too stupid.

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