Friday, December 02, 2011

"Each algorithm has a point of view"

--- Kevin Slavin, interviewed by Alison George for New Scientist in "Game developer: Beware algorithms running your life" 22 August 2011

Quote in context:

The pernicious thing about algorithms is that they have the mathematical quality of truth - you have the sense that they are neutral - and yet, of course, they have authorship. For example, Google's search engine is composed entirely of fancy mathematics, but its algorithms, like everybody's, are all based on an ideology - in this case that a page is more valuable if other pages think it's valuable. Each algorithm has a point of view, and yet we have no sense of what algorithms are, or even that they exist.