What Exactly Are Algorithms?
Let’s start with the most important question: what the heck are algorithms? Algorithms themselves are specific sets of steps that need to be done to perform computations, Wachter-Boettcher explains. They’re not magic. Algorithms perform mathematical computations humans could do but at a scale we could never manage. And we use them everywhere, to do everything. “Algorithms now control a huge number of systems that we interact with every day—from which posts bubble up to the top of your Facebook feed, to whether image recognition software can correctly identify a person, to what kinds of job ads you see online,” Wachter-Boettcher writes. The trouble? Algorithms aren’t built in a vacuum. “No matter how much tech companies talk about algorithms like they’re nothing but advanced math, they always reflect the values of their creators: the programmers and product teams working in tech,” Wachter-Boettcher explains in Technically Wrong. “And as we’ve seen time and again, the values that tech culture holds aren’t neutral. After all, the same biases that lead teams to launch a product that assumes all its users are straight, or a signup form that assumes people aren’t multiracial, are what lead them to launch machine-learning products that are just as exclusive and alienating—and, even worse, locked in a black box, where they’re all but invisible.” I started the experiment by searching my chosen test titles. For each title, I recorded the “Customers Who Viewed This Item” recommendations.
What the Results Mean
This approach creates a book recommendation echo chamber. You, a reader, start to think that because you see a book everywhere in your recommendations, it’s popular. If it’s so popular, it therefore must be good. You buy the book, the act of which ensures that book shows up in someone else’s recommended results and all but codifies the algorithm’s understanding that you like this exact type of book. It’s a self-perpetuating cycle in which bestsellers come to mean best quality, a cycle that privileges well-known authors, many of whom are men. Compare that to your local indie bookstore, many of which have feminist focuses and specialize in diverse shelves.
Thinking About Algorithms
“Algorithms are making choices that affect your life, from whether you can find or keep a job to how much you pay for a product to what information you can access,” Wachter-Boettcher writes in Technically Wrong. In Technically Wrong, Wachter-Boettcher notes that most developers who create these systems aren’t considering the downstream effects of their work. But it’s not because they’re consciously biased; it’s because they’re not thinking about their own identity in context of their creations. She cites University of Utah computer science professor Suresh Venkatasubramnian with a particularly important observation. “No one really spends a lot of time thinking about privilege and status,” Venkatasubramnian said in an interview with Motherboard. “If you are the defaults, you just assume you just are.”
