Algorithmic Control Quotes

We are living in a computer-programmed reality, and the only clue we have to it is when some variable is changed, and some alteration in reality occurs. We have the overwhelming impression that we were reliving the present - deja vu.

To say that AI will start doing what it wants for its own purposes is like saying a calculator will start making its own calculations.

People are seduced by signals from the world, but that is manipulation, not reality. Computers have learned more about us than we've learned about them.

Technology is like the 666 because it controls us.

I am much less concerned with whatever it is technology may be doing to people that what people are choosing to do to one another through technology. Facebook's reduction of people to predictively modeled profiles and investment banking's convolution of the marketplace into an algorithmic battleground were not the choices of machines.

As algorithms push humans out of the job market, wealth and power might become concentrated in the hands of the tiny elite that owns the all-powerful algorithms, creating unprecedented social and political inequality. Alternatively, the algorithms might themselves become the owners.

A lot of jobs today are being automated; what happens when you extend that concept to very important areas of society like law enforcement? What happens if you start controlling the behavior of criminals or people in general with software-running machines? Those questions, they look like they're sci-fi but they're not.

In the emerging, highly programmed landscape ahead, you will either create the software or you will be the software. It's really that simple: Program, or be programmed. Choose the former, and you gain access to the control panel of civilization. Choose the latter, and it could be the last real choice you get to make.

Arcade-game characters have no free will. They're programmed to do one thing day in and day out - they don't have a choice in the matter.

My take is that A.I. is taking over. A few humans might still be 'in charge,' but less and less so.

The algorithms that orchestrate our ads are starting to orchestrate our lives.

The computer would do anything you programmed it to do.

It's time to wake up to the fact that you're just another avatar in someone else's MMO. Worse: From where they stand, all-powerful Big Data analysts that they are, you look an awful lot like a bot.

At times, we forget the magnitude of the havoc we can wreak by off-loading our minds onto super-intelligent machines, that is, until they run away from us, like mad sorcerers' apprentices, and drag us up to the precipice for a look down into the abyss.

I ain't gonna work on YouTube's farm no more.

This is a political fight. We need to demand accountability for our algorithmic overlords.

As machines take over the decision-making that saves lives, we are left with fewer chances to save lives later.

Don't get into this false sense that you are an individual when you're on Facebook. No. You're Not. You're a pawn in their scheme.

When you make machines that are capable of obeying instructions slavishly, and among those instructions are 'duplicate me' instructions, then of course the system is wide open to exploitation by parasites.

They’re everywhere, and it’s not a mistake. These are private companies building private algorithms for private ends.... Algorithms were built by private companies and sold to the government institutions. They call it their “secret sauce” — that’s why they can’t tell us about it. It’s also private power. They are profiting for wielding the authority of the inscrutable.