Thoughts on Kevin Slavin’s Talk on how Algorithms are Shaping Culture: Quasi-Objects with Agency

I just watched my favorite TED talk of all time from Kevin Slavin on how algorithms are changing our world. His talk got me thinking about how algorithms created by humans infleunce tastes, desires, and consumption patterns. He argues that we’re creating algorithms to run machinese that even humans don’t understand.

So what happens next? What do we we do when we know that we’re designing stuff that is increasingly difficult to manage? How do we stop the algorithms from attacking! :)

I am not an algorithmic determinist and I don’t think Slavin is either, but what his story illustrates are the subtle but serious ways that our need for fast computation of data is changing what we build in order to fulfill this need.

And yes of course we’ve always been reshaping the world for our information needs from the postal system to the telegraph and the printing industry. But Kevin’s point is that the scale and speed of algorithmic effects on a grand and granular level is unprecedented.

Though, what we have to keep in mind is that algorithms are programmed by people. So with the example that Slavin gave in his talk of algorithms going rogue - my initial thoughts are that it’s not the algorithms themselves that are bad, but it’s the cultural assumptions that programmers make when creating algorithms to carry out a design or function that turns out to be bad. And even more so, it’s the actual culture in which the programmers are embedded in that allows such assumptions to be made in the first place.

One way to counter such a culture is a to bring more awareness in a specific industry that relies on algorithms. So if we work with the elevator example in Slavin’s talk, that means designers of algorithmically controlled elevators need to conduct user tests. User experience tests would show that elevator riders are freaked out without a “stop” button. With the stock market examples,  we need more expert oversight and analysis of the financial industry that depends on algorithmic trading. And this oversight needs to come from an organization or individual with power to act upon the financial industry.

Now I think many social scientists watching Kevin’s talk would claim that he is being a techno-critic, someone who only speaks of the dark horrors of technology. Or they would claim that he is being a techno-determinist, someone who overly atttributes power to technology instead of humans.   But I don’t think neither are the case. The heart of Slavin’s talk, to me, is story about the deep interdependence of objects and human beings. We create technology that we increasingly don’t understand and don’t always know how to stop. We see this happening throughout history.

• The nuclear bomb - we made it - but we still don’t know how to completely stop it now that the knowledge is in many hands.
• The cotton gin  - the cotton gin was seen as a technological feat at the time, but  it created a greater dependency on cotton exports and thus perpetuating slavery in the US.
• Guns - guns have killed millions of people and in America we still don’t know how to stop the use of it.
• Fire  - humans discovered how to make fires and til this day there are still human-made fire accidents that burn out of control.

This list could go on. The point is that Kevin’s talk speaks to the historical interaction that has been part and parcel to the existence of human beings - humans have created technology that ends up out of our control and now algorithms are the latest example.

And this new kind of nature, algorithms, stands outside of the subject-object binary. Slavin’s analysis of the how the entire algorithm trading industry is changing the layout of NYC city is a brilliant example of how algorithms are not a passive object without agency. This quote below from Bruno Latour illustrates this point:

“For the thing we are looking at is not a human thing, nor is it an inhuman thing. It offers, rather a continuous passage, a commerce, an interchange, between what humans inscribe in it and what it prescribes to humans […] What should it be called neither object nor subject. An instituted object, quasi-object, quasi-subject, a thing that possesses body and soul indissociably.”

So yes, algorithms do have agency on some level. In thinking about algorithms as quasi-objects, they are not purely logical formulas. They are built by humans, executed by humans, and interpreted by humans. What sets human beings apart from robots and animals is that we engage is symbolic behavior and thinking. Symbolic thinking is what makes us crazy but what also makes us human. So the beauty of Kevin’s talk is that he shows us that algorithms are the very cultural products of humans - there very existence speaks to what makes humans special - algorithms are symbolic if you can look beyond the logics of the formula. This makes algorithms very beautiful and scary. In a previous iteration of this talk, he said that

“algorithms feel like truth because they’re made out of math, but every one of them is just an idea that someone had, some hypothesis about the world.”

His talk speaks to the heart of why I created Cultural Bytes - to talk about how technology and culture are in an ongoing dance with each other.

“Algorithms are the physics of culture.” “and now there is a 3rd co-evolutionary force the algorithms, we’re going to have to understand them as nature, and in a way they are.” Kevin Slavin, TED, 2011

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And BTW Kevin’s talk and Bobby McFerris’s hacking of our brains with the pentatonic scale are now my most favoritists of all universal favorite TED talks. Both of them are able to cut through the stuffiness and at times entitled feeling that TED talks gives off. They both speak to their craft in the most sincere way that reaches out to you even if you’re not in the audience - Kevin’s is storytelling and Bobby’s is creating music.

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UPDATE: I jut found this really lovely quote on algorithms from one of my fave blogs, Modern and Im/MAterial Things by Christina  Dennaou. I’ve bolded the part that I think is relevant to Slavin’s talk.

 Algorithms are made to restrict the amount of information the user sees—that’s their raison d’être. By drawing on data about the world we live in, they end up reinforcing whatever societal values happen to be dominant, without our even noticing. They are normativity made into code—albeit a code that we barely understand, even as it shapes our lives.

We’re not going to stop using algorithms. They’re too useful. But we need to be more aware of the algorithmic perversity that’s creeping into our lives. The short-term fit of a dating match or a Web page doesn’t measure the long-term value it may hold. Statistically likely does not mean correct, or just, or fair. Google-generated kadosh is meretricious, offering a desiccated kind of choice. It’s when people deviate from what we predict they’ll do that they prove they are individuals, set apart from all others of the human type.

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UPDATE Sept. 15th, 2011 - Kevin and his TED talk star in Apple’s latest Ipad ad!

(Source: youtube.com)