http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-03-21/the-algorithms-we-know-nothing-about/8277890

“With Facebook’s news feed controlling the (fake!) news we see and the algorithmic robo-debt debacle engulfing Centrelink, it’s time we knew more about the algorithms having a growing impact on our lives…”

Probably worth a thread.

And of course human brains employ algorithms.

Really I think the article is about deferring to machines. This computer’s a machine. The facebook page I have open I see as a machine(operating in the social field).

The human brain and body can be seen as machine. I see it this way a bit, when thinking of mechanisms. I see a lot as mechanisms, as devices.

But then I retreat, consider differentiating attributes of the organic. The biological, the brain as wetware for example, but importantly what it is to be fleshy. Like to have circulating oxygenated blood, a breathing thing. And to be a primate mammal. Stuff like that.

Lately i’ve been thinking about how to be living is (to generalize) repressive of death (or that dead), in essence. It’s weird territory in ways, but’s interesting of what is living, what is alive. A persons view (of self and world around) is much from this. Maybe not in words, maybe it doesn’t even require thought (probably makes some thoughts less likely, or more difficult). Basic homeostatic mechanisms do the job.

I’m not greatly human-centric, nor am I fond of overshoot in the territory of reality as social construction – hungry or greedy minds that incline delusions that reality is mostly what minds do, that sort of thing. I’m old fashioned, I think there is a nature, I walk through it every day, like gravity and air. They have attributes (a reality) completely independent of the work of human minds. A fortunate thing.

Back to my facebook, it’s open in another window here.

I remind myself it’s a machine. There are familar faces, photos I put up, and I see “friends”. Hooky territory for sure.

And there’s the news feed, and advertizing.

Now to industrial-scale exploitation of associations, the force of.

The ABC has never done this. It’s algorithmless too, and makes fully transparent any that sneak in. There’s nobody at the ABC involved in anything involving little-understood-algorithms. There’re no minds at the ABC.

Of course centrelink have been deferring to machine systems for atleast a decade and half. It’s now invested with a more obvious aggressiveness, leaked out, and the humans are fighting back.

Back to shared notions (projections maybe, unabstracted) of what is alive and how they maybe are repressive of the subject of what is dead.

I see a shift of what is alive into what is dead, into machines. I mean the ABC, Centrelink, and Facebook are as dead as door knobs really (excluding the people). This computer i’m typing shit into’s dead as. Car advertizements project the idea they (new cars) give life to your life.

So I see a problem, it being repression of death (the subject, things related mortality – organic reality), but attributing that dead (of machines) with being alive (in some sense). That’s partly to do with culture outliving the individual, which’s its purpose (one of).

Later i’ll go to bed, probably watch the fire and drift off, and that’ll be a comfort because of a few hundred thousand years of associations (and my life experience), the warmth and the light it provides. Then there’s all those past that died of exposure, and they won’t occupy my mind too much as I drift off.

> computers make decisions about social security, taxation, parental leave, superannuation, migration, bio security and child support. In every case, some kind of algorithm may be used to make decisions, yet we have no knowledge of how these work.

Beware the royal “we”.

Well, presumably somebody does. Or perhaps not. There’s something I’ve read about computer programs always grow in size until they exceed the capacity of the programmer to maintain it. We see that all the time with Microsoft.

mollwollfumble said:

> computers make decisions about social security, taxation, parental leave, superannuation, migration, bio security and child support. In every case, some kind of algorithm may be used to make decisions, yet we have no knowledge of how these work.

Beware the royal “we”.

Well, presumably somebody does. Or perhaps not. There’s something I’ve read about computer programs always grow in size until they exceed the capacity of the programmer to maintain it. We see that all the time with Microsoft.

I doubt that Microsoft would be the most extreme example of that, but in any case, in all of the cases given, in as far as they are determined by computer, the algorithms would be simple and straightforward.

That’s not to say that they might not sometimes produce unexpected and undesired results, but as things are at the moment, there would be nothing very mysterious about them.

The Rev Dodgson said:

mollwollfumble said:

> computers make decisions about social security, taxation, parental leave, superannuation, migration, bio security and child support. In every case, some kind of algorithm may be used to make decisions, yet we have no knowledge of how these work.

Beware the royal “we”.

Well, presumably somebody does. Or perhaps not. There’s something I’ve read about computer programs always grow in size until they exceed the capacity of the programmer to maintain it. We see that all the time with Microsoft.

I doubt that Microsoft would be the most extreme example of that, but in any case, in all of the cases given, in as far as they are determined by computer, the algorithms would be simple and straightforward.

That’s not to say that they might not sometimes produce unexpected and undesired results, but as things are at the moment, there would be nothing very mysterious about them.

Weapons/systems software often seems to bite off more than it can chew in regards to what they want and what is possible and error free

Cymek said:

Weapons/systems software often seems to bite off more than it can chew in regards to what they want and what is possible and error free

There’s an excellent example of that in the Collins class submarines. The original weapons control and guidance system was awful. It was only a couple of decades later that the whole computer systems were stripped out and replaced with less expensive ones that worked.

mollwollfumble said:

Cymek said:

Weapons/systems software often seems to bite off more than it can chew in regards to what they want and what is possible and error free

There’s an excellent example of that in the Collins class submarines. The original weapons control and guidance system was awful. It was only a couple of decades later that the whole computer systems were stripped out and replaced with less expensive ones that worked.

Yes and was also thinking of the F-35 combat software, from Wikipedia it states by 2012, the total estimated lines of code for the entire program (onboard and offboard) had grown from the previous year’s estimate of 8 million lines to 24 million lines. Can you imagine the effort require to write and error check the above

Well, that’s fair, newer computers tend to be cheaper and work better than older ones.

transition said:

And of course human brains employ algorithms.

The human brain and body can be seen as machine. I see it this way a bit, when thinking of mechanisms. I see a lot as mechanisms, as devices.

But then I retreat, consider differentiating attributes of the organic. The biological, the brain as wetware for example, but importantly what it is to be fleshy. Like to have circulating oxygenated blood, a breathing thing. And to be a primate mammal. Stuff like that.

Lately I’ve been thinking about how to be living is (to generalize) repressive of death (or that dead), in essence. It’s weird territory in ways, but’s interesting of what is living, what is alive. A persons view (of self and world around) is much from this. Maybe not in words, maybe it doesn’t even require thought (probably makes some thoughts less likely, or more difficult). Basic homeostatic mechanisms do the job.

I agree that I don’t think anyone has a really clear idea of what the algorithms running in the human (or animal) brain are doing. It’s a tricky mix of digital and analog connections. Occasionally if you ask a computer to do the same thing twice it will give a different answer. If you ask a brain to do the same thing twice you will almost certainly get a different answer.

Given that plants and fungi survive quite well without a brain, and that dinosaurs and giraffes survive quite well with tiny brains, I’m not even sure why we bother to have a brain at all.

Cymek said:

mollwollfumble said:

Cymek said:

Weapons/systems software often seems to bite off more than it can chew in regards to what they want and what is possible and error free

There’s an excellent example of that in the Collins class submarines. The original weapons control and guidance system was awful. It was only a couple of decades later that the whole computer systems were stripped out and replaced with less expensive ones that worked.

Yes and was also thinking of the F-35 combat software, from Wikipedia it states by 2012, the total estimated lines of code for the entire program (onboard and offboard) had grown from the previous year’s estimate of 8 million lines to 24 million lines. Can you imagine the effort require to write and error check the above

Yes, I can imagine that, actually. It’s not a pretty picture. For starters, only about 3% of those lines of code would actually do something, the rest would be housekeeping and obsolete/unused code.

“The Microsoft Windows operating system has roughly 50 million lines of code.”

mollwollfumble said:

Cymek said:

mollwollfumble said:

There’s an excellent example of that in the Collins class submarines. The original weapons control and guidance system was awful. It was only a couple of decades later that the whole computer systems were stripped out and replaced with less expensive ones that worked.

Yes and was also thinking of the F-35 combat software, from Wikipedia it states by 2012, the total estimated lines of code for the entire program (onboard and offboard) had grown from the previous year’s estimate of 8 million lines to 24 million lines. Can you imagine the effort require to write and error check the above

Yes, I can imagine that, actually. It’s not a pretty picture. For starters, only about 3% of those lines of code would actually do something, the rest would be housekeeping and obsolete/unused code.

“The Microsoft Windows operating system has roughly 50 million lines of code.”

Just imagine you are in combat initiate the firing of a missile and a little Windows pops us with update required and then it reboots and crashes to a blue screen of death

Cymek said:

mollwollfumble said:

Cymek said:

Yes and was also thinking of the F-35 combat software, from Wikipedia it states by 2012, the total estimated lines of code for the entire program (onboard and offboard) had grown from the previous year’s estimate of 8 million lines to 24 million lines. Can you imagine the effort require to write and error check the above

Yes, I can imagine that, actually. It’s not a pretty picture. For starters, only about 3% of those lines of code would actually do something, the rest would be housekeeping and obsolete/unused code.

“The Microsoft Windows operating system has roughly 50 million lines of code.”

Just imagine you are in combat initiate the firing of a missile and a little Windows pops us with update required and then it reboots and crashes to a blue screen of death

That’s one way to save lives.

mollwollfumble said:

Cymek said:

mollwollfumble said:

There’s an excellent example of that in the Collins class submarines. The original weapons control and guidance system was awful. It was only a couple of decades later that the whole computer systems were stripped out and replaced with less expensive ones that worked.

Yes and was also thinking of the F-35 combat software, from Wikipedia it states by 2012, the total estimated lines of code for the entire program (onboard and offboard) had grown from the previous year’s estimate of 8 million lines to 24 million lines. Can you imagine the effort require to write and error check the above

Yes, I can imagine that, actually. It’s not a pretty picture. For starters, only about 3% of those lines of code would actually do something, the rest would be housekeeping and obsolete/unused code.

“The Microsoft Windows operating system has roughly 50 million lines of code.”

I just counted the lines of code in the Linux kernel — just the kernel, none of the actual programs that you need to run: 18436434. 18 million lines of code (I excluded comments, so that’s just actual code.) Kernel version 4.9.16.

mollwollfumble said:

Cymek said:

mollwollfumble said:

Yes, I can imagine that, actually. It’s not a pretty picture. For starters, only about 3% of those lines of code would actually do something, the rest would be housekeeping and obsolete/unused code.

“The Microsoft Windows operating system has roughly 50 million lines of code.”

Just imagine you are in combat initiate the firing of a missile and a little Windows pops us with update required and then it reboots and crashes to a blue screen of death

That’s one way to save lives.

Thats an idea isn’t it, you design combat software so good everyone wants it you sell it anyone/everyone and put in a backdoor so it can’t actually fire or kill anyone

btm said:

I just counted the lines of code in the Linux kernel — just the kernel, none of the actual programs that you need to run: 18436434. 18 million lines of code (I excluded comments, so that’s just actual code.) Kernel version 4.9.16.

I’d love to know how you did that. What command(s)?