In this Ted Talk, Kevin Slavin’s tone of delivery is subtle. He opens his message by showing beautiful photographs by Michael Najjar. But as soon as he captures audience’s amazement of the majestic mountain ranges, he declares that the pictures have been tampered with. Digitally, the peaks and valleys in fact articulate the Dow Jones index. The audience responds with a laugh, as if to admit, the joke is on us. 

What he calls, “metaphor with teeth” comes across less as a warning than a narrative already ensured. Humans are already designing for the “machine dialect”.

The math that we “make” does not extract information or answer our query per se but support machine analysis. Slavin compares the mathematical processes to a break-down of massive amounts of data that humans would not ordinarily be able to decode. Algorithms decipher them to the smallest degree before reassembling them for human interpretation. That is the algorithmic process that he claims “acquires sensibility of truth”. Humans then report the narrative upon a machine decode. Therefore, humans serve machines.

Slavin views algorithms as an almost organic component of human development. He cites examples of how far we have already gone to accommodate algorithmic “needs”. Despite our lack of complete understanding of their inner workings, humans have surrendered control to the point of “running through the United States with dynamite and rock saws so that an algorithm can close the deal”. This, according to Slavin is when the math becomes real. Algorithms shape our reality and forge our world.

Compared to critics like, Jaron Lanier (2010) who cautions against a culture of Singularity where humans abide by the ideologies of machines, Slavin reckons a “manifested destiny” where algorithms not only dictate actions carried out on earth but also the direction of mathematical development based in machine efficiency. 

As such, Slavin designates algorithms as the “third co-evolutionary force”— a recognition so great that only man and nature correlate. The acknowledgement of machine-capability is not new. But the integration of algorithmic contention to the point of equivalency (to man and nature) in such casual manner curtails humanism yet another degree.

Is anyone else alarmed?

Reference

Lanier, J. (2010). You are not a gadget. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.