Kevin Slavin argues that we’re living in a world designed for — and increasingly controlled by — algorithms. In this riveting talk from TEDGlobal, he shows how these complex computer programs determine: espionage tactics, stock prices, movie scripts, and architecture. “We’re writing things (…) that we can no longer read. And we’ve rendered something illegible, and we’ve lost the sense of what’s actually happening in this world that we’ve made. (…) “We’re running through the United States with dynamite and rock saws so that an algorithm can close the deal three microseconds faster, all for a communications framework that no human will ever know; that’s a kind of manifest destiny.” - Amira

“But the Turing test cuts both ways. You can’t tell if a machine has gotten smarter or if you’ve just lowered your own standards of intelligence to such a degree that the machine seems smart. If you can have a conversation with a simulated person presented by an AI program, can you tell how far you’ve let your sense of personhood degrade in order to make the illusion work for you? // People degrade themselves in order to make machines seem smart all the time. Before the crash, bankers believed in supposedly intelligent algorithms that could calculate credit risks before making bad loans. We ask teachers to teach to standardized tests so a student will look good to an algorithm. We have repeatedly demonstrated our species’ bottomless ability to lower our standards to make information technology look good. Every instance of intelligence in a machine is ambiguous. // The same ambiguity that motivated dubious academic AI projects in the past has been repackaged as mass culture today. Did that search engine really know what you want, or are you playing along, lowering your standards to make it seem clever? While it’s to be expected that the human perspective will be changed by encounters with profound new technologies, the exercise of treating machine intelligence as real requires people to reduce their mooring to reality.” — Jaron Lanier, You are Not a Gadget (2010) - Amira

if you’ve just lowered your own standards of intelligence - don't think so. We just over estimated how little it took to seem human. We can feel sorry for a very basic puppet with a vaguely human face, so it doesn't take much; Before the crash, bankers believed in supposedly intelligent algorithms that could calculate credit risks before making bad loans - not really, it was a scam so all they needed to do was bamboozle customers into thinking it was possible; Did that search engine really know what you want, or are you playing along, lowering your standards to make it seem clever? - we know it doesn't know what we want and the results are simply better than we had before - Todd Hoff