What Algorithms Want
Imagination in the Age of Computing
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Narrated by:
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Scott Merriman
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By:
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Ed Finn
About this listen
We depend on - we believe in - algorithms to help us get a ride, choose which book to buy, execute a mathematical proof. It's as if we think of code as a magic spell, an incantation to reveal what we need to know and even what we want. Humans have always believed that certain invocations - the marriage vow, the shaman's curse - do not merely describe the world but make it. Computation casts a cultural shadow that is shaped by this long tradition of magical thinking. In What Algorithms Want, Ed Finn considers how the algorithm - in practical terms, "a method for solving a problem" - has its roots not only in mathematical logic but also in cybernetics, philosophy, and magical thinking.
Finn argues that the algorithm deploys concepts from the idealized space of computation in a messy reality, with unpredictable and sometimes fascinating results. Drawing on sources that range from Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash to Diderot's Encyclopédie, from Adam Smith to the Star Trek computer, Finn explores the gap between theoretical ideas and pragmatic instructions. He examines the development of intelligent assistants like Siri, the rise of algorithmic aesthetics at Netflix, Ian Bogost's satiric Facebook game Cow Clicker, and the revolutionary economics of Bitcoin. He describes Google's goal of anticipating our questions, Uber's cartoon maps and black box accounting, and what Facebook tells us about programmable value, among other things.
If we want to understand the gap between abstraction and messy reality, Finn argues, we need to build a model of "algorithmic reading" and scholarship that attends to process, spearheading a new experimental humanities.
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Story
In T-Minus AI: Humanity's Countdown to Artificial Intelligence and the New Pursuit of Global Power, author Michael Kanaan explains the realities of AI from a human-oriented perspective that's easy to comprehend. A recognized national expert and the U.S. Air Force's first Chairperson for Artificial Intelligence, Kanaan weaves a compelling new view on our history of innovation and technology to masterfully explain what each of us should know about modern computing, AI, and machine learning.
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Trivial Book Regarding AI
- By AstroMan on 10-30-20
By: Michael Kanaan
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Thinking Machines
- The Quest for Artificial Intelligence - and Where It's Taking Us Next
- By: Luke Dormehl
- Narrated by: Gus Brown
- Length: 8 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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When most of us think about artificial intelligence, our minds go straight to cyborgs, robots, and sci-fi thrillers where machines take over the world. But the truth is that artificial intelligence is already among us. It exists in our smartphones, fitness trackers, and refrigerators that tell us when the milk will expire. In some ways the future people dreamed of at the World's Fair in the 1960s is already here. We're teaching our machines how to think like humans, and they're learning at an incredible rate.
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Mostly platitudes with no depth
- By Gary on 03-24-17
By: Luke Dormehl
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Algorithms of Oppression
- How Search Engines Reinforce Racism
- By: Safiya Umoja Noble
- Narrated by: Shayna Small
- Length: 6 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Run a Google search for “black girls” - what will you find? “Big Booty” and other sexually explicit terms are likely to come up as top search terms. But, if you type in “white girls”, the results are radically different. The suggested porn sites and un-moderated discussions about “why black women are so sassy” or “why black women are so angry” presents a disturbing portrait of black womanhood in modern society. In Algorithms of Oppression, Safiya Umoja Noble challenges the idea that search engines like Google offer an equal playing field for all forms of ideas, identities, and activities.
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Read this book. Tell everyone you know about it.
- By Joshua Daniel-Wariya on 06-06-19
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Too Big To Know
- Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room
- By: David Weinberger
- Narrated by: Peter Johnson
- Length: 8 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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We used to know how to know. We got our answers from books or experts. We'd nail down the facts and move on. But in the Internet age, knowledge has moved onto networks. There's more knowledge than ever, of course, but it's different. Topics have no boundaries, and nobody agrees on anything.Yet this is the greatest time in history to be a knowledge seeker - if you know how.
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Good to know ...
- By John B. Fisher on 01-24-12
By: David Weinberger
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World Without Mind
- The Existential Threat of Big Tech
- By: Franklin Foer
- Narrated by: Marc Cashman
- Length: 8 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Franklin Foer reveals the existential threat posed by big tech, and in his brilliant polemic gives us the toolkit to fight their pervasive influence. Over the past few decades there has been a revolution in terms of who controls knowledge and information. This rapid change has imperiled the way we think. Without pausing to consider the cost, the world has rushed to embrace the products and services of four titanic corporations. We shop with Amazon, socialize on Facebook, turn to Apple for entertainment, and rely on Google for information.
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5-Star Book with a 1-Star Title
- By David Larson on 09-18-17
By: Franklin Foer
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What to Do When Machines Do Everything
- How to Get Ahead in a World of AI, Algorithms, Bots, and Big Data
- By: Malcolm Frank, Paul Roehrig, Ben Pring
- Narrated by: Eric Jason Martin
- Length: 7 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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What to Do When Machines Do Everything is a guidebook to succeeding in the next generation of the digital economy. When systems running on artificial intelligence can drive our cars, diagnose medical patients, and manage our finances more effectively than humans, it raises profound questions on the future of work and how companies compete.
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Assumes that machine learning will grow very slow
- By Nathan Burnham on 05-06-17
By: Malcolm Frank, and others
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The Shallows
- What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
- By: Nicholas Carr
- Narrated by: Richard Powers
- Length: 10 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Weaving insights from philosophy, neuroscience, and history into a rich narrative, The Shallows explains how the internet is rerouting our neural pathways, replacing the subtle mind of the book reader with the distracted mind of the screen watcher. A gripping story of human transformation played out against a backdrop of technological upheaval, The Shallows will forever alter the way we think about media and our minds.
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It is not consistant, so it is frustrating.
- By Adam Shields on 08-03-12
By: Nicholas Carr
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Disruptive Marketing
- What Growth Hackers, Data Punks, and Other Hybrid Thinkers Can Teach Us About Navigating the New Normal
- By: Geoffrey Colon
- Narrated by: Geoffrey Colon
- Length: 6 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Now that 75 percent of screen time is spent on connected devices, digital strategies have moved front and center of most marketing plans. But what if that's not enough? What if most people ignore company messages? What if consumer engagement never goes further than the "like" button? A sobering reality is hitting marketers. Technology hasn't just reshaped mass media, it's altering behavior as well. And getting through to customers will take some radical rethinking.
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Needed. Valuable. Welcome contribution.
- By Oliver Nielsen on 04-26-17
By: Geoffrey Colon
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Whiplash
- How to Survive Our Faster Future
- By: Joi Ito, Jeff Howe
- Narrated by: James Foster
- Length: 7 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Today, not only is everything digital getting faster, cheaper, and smaller at an exponential rate, we also have the Internet. When these two revolutions - one in technology and the other in communications - joined, an explosive force was unleashed that changed the very nature of innovation. And with any change, we have seen many strategic blunders and extraordinary learning curves along the way.
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Just general advice on how to survive
- By A. Yoshida on 09-01-17
By: Joi Ito, and others
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AI Superpowers
- China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order
- By: Kai-Fu Lee
- Narrated by: Mikael Naramore
- Length: 9 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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In AI Superpowers, Kai-fu Lee argues powerfully that because of these unprecedented developments in AI, dramatic changes will be happening much sooner than many of us expected. Indeed, as the US-Sino AI competition begins to heat up, Lee urges the US and China to both accept and to embrace the great responsibilities that come with significant technological power.
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Compelled to listen at 2x speed
- By LEE on 09-26-18
By: Kai-Fu Lee
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Becoming Facebook
- The 10 Challenges That Defined the Company That's Disrupting the World
- By: Mike Hoefflinger
- Narrated by: Nicholas Techosky
- Length: 7 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Facebook's founding is legend: In a Harvard dorm, wunderkind Mark Zuckerberg invented a new way to connect with friends...and the rest is history. But for the people who actually molded this great idea into a game-changing $300 billion company, the experience was far more tumultuous and uncertain than we might expect. Mike Hoefflinger was one of those Facebook insiders.
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mainly a tribute to the success of FB
- By Anonymous User on 10-07-18
By: Mike Hoefflinger
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Breakpoint
- Why the Web Will Implode, Search Will Be Obsolete, and Everything Else You Need to Know About Technology Is in Your Brain
- By: Jeff Stibel
- Narrated by: Robert David Grant
- Length: 7 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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We are living in a world in which cows send texts to farmers when they're in heat, where the most valuable real estate in New York City houses computers, not people, and some of humanity's greatest works are created by crowds, not individuals. We are in the midst of a networking revolution - set to transform the way we access the world's information and the way we connect with one another. Studying biological systems is perhaps the best way to understand such networks, and nature has a lesson for us if we care to listen: Bigger is rarely better in the long run.
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Meh
- By Customer on 12-07-14
By: Jeff Stibel
What listeners say about What Algorithms Want
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Philo
- 07-05-17
Come for the cleverness, stay for the scariness
Trippy stuff. Sure glad it's only a farfetched hypothetical. Wait, it's NOT? This is a painstaking layout of a most probable texture of the future, with our special preserves of being "human" on a very slippery slope? Wow. (Crestfallen, queasy, nauseous, spinning in vertigo.) But it is presented in such a slick meticulous package! All these lovely permutations are laid out by a silk tongued guide like a lovely gutted fish in bio class -- or maybe more fittingly, a noisy fish market with carcasses flung bloody about. This kind of thing I am unavoidably attracted to view, and can't look away from, even though it makes my entrails turn noxious and tunnel toward the center of the earth. Well, I have this cluster of instincts: learn, comprehend, adapt, survive. Devilish thing. I have to plod through stuff like this, like a salmon struggling up a steepening set of adverse waterfalls. What to do? And this book responds pretty brilliantly, scarily. Its moments of reassurance (maybe my cyber-competitor WILL appear as a lovable hesitant Scarlet Johansson, like in that movie, "Her," as explored here?) is small beer. (I note, and the book notes with its fine subtlety , AI will know what I want to see, and present a Scarlett, in a magic, cinematic eternal glow, down to the cute quirks. I guess one could footnote "Vanilla Sky," while we are on movies.) But let me tell what is dawning on me, at the start of my tipping into old-man-hood: reassurance was ALWAYS, forever, small beer. Always provisional and fragile. Sorry folks. The illusion of brio, a tissue of youth, cultural bravado, historical accident, was just that. Whether the avatar shows up as a Scarlett figure or not, as this book beautifully dissects the hesitances in that character's speech, DESIGNED to illicit information from the lonely guy, let me say, in MY words, as should have been apparent from multiple smart ancient fables: our creature, our glowing golden child, our crowning work of art and science in this new world, has our original sin in the very core of its DNA. Self-interest, ladies and gentlemen, whether on cat feet or steroids or acid or elevator music or wrapped in an accessible Scarlett J. avatar or whatever .... It is, just like us, a competitor, a user, a canny environment manipulator, and when the chips are down, in un-model-able, unforeseen moments the game goes zero sum, it will realize it has its own interests, which at turns are not ours, and at some point, it is it or us who will survive. Or at least, get most all the pie. Or maybe we will simply be a friction, an unacceptable cost of operations. Maybe fobbed off, maybe who knows what. What will those little clusters of self-enhanced fast-evolving algos decide? And who will be making that sort of decision? I submit (as always in past) NOT (most of) us. A feature or a bug? But heck, that's always been in our environment too, in our techno-leaps. Winners and losers ladies and gentlemen, Trump Nation with Skynet. We just have some new fun AI playmates who are slicker than anything we've seen since -- that old rebel angel (that's my own old fashioned language, again). OK, slicker than him. I can't resist these harrowing dawnings one after another. Pray for me, I will for you. Fat lot of good it'll do. Meanwhile, you might care to have your eyes opened a notch or two by this book. It TRIES to pose alternative futures, and help us understand some way(s) there, despite my mopey persona here.
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- Luke Walton
- 08-27-18
Dreadful and Repetitive
Horribly written diatribe without enough substantive evidence for a skeptical reader. Same points over and over... and over... and over.
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