King Algorithm?

Sunday's New York Times "Week in Review" included short article on algorithms that run on a mixture of computers and humans that somehow manages never to mention Luis Von Ahn.

It was the Internet that stripped the word of its innocence. Algorithms, as closely guarded as state secrets, buy and sell stocks and mortgage-backed securities, sometimes with a dispassionate zeal that crashes markets. Algorithms promise to find the news that fits you, and even your perfect mate. You can’t visit Amazon.com without being confronted with a list of books and other products that the Great Algoritmi recommends. [...]

What is spreading through the Web is not exactly artificial intelligence. For all the research that has gone into cognitive and computer science, the brain’s most formidable algorithms — those used to recognize images or sounds or understand language — have eluded simulation. The alternative has been to incorporate people, with their special skills, as components of the Net.

The article makes this symbiotic relationship between humans and machines sound novel (and rather sinister), but to me it doesn't seem fundamentally different than other aspects of augmented social intelligence. Hasn't human civilization always depended on algorithms performed by a combination of human and machine? Wasn't that the foundation of the industrial revolution, or parliamentary democracy, or the Macedonian phalanx, or written language? Hasn't the world economy always run on a combination of human decisions and careful arithmetic? What else is agriculture but an algorithmic (mechanical, step-by-step) response to the life cycles of certain plants and animals, the weather, and human hunger?

Comments

[Aaron]

Sure -- with the right worldview, everything that human civilization has ever done is algorithmic. But I think its nice to have an article in the Times that makes it clear that algorithms can exist independently of (or at least not exclusively of) computer code. It suggests the possibility that studying algorithms is really about studying the world, and not about studying computers.