Are You Overestimating The Algorithm?

Short Wave

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4.7 • 6K Ratings

🗓️ 3 September 2024

⏱️ 16 minutes

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Summary

Humans hallucinate. Algorithms lie.

At least, that's one difference that Joy Buolamwini and Kyle Chayka want to make clear. When ChatGPT tells you that a book exists when it doesn't – or professes its undying love – that's often called a "hallucination." Buolamwini, a computer scientist, prefers to call it "spicy autocomplete." But not all algorithmic errors are as innocuous. So today's show, we get into: How do algorithms work? What are their impacts? And how can we speak up about changing them?

This is a shortened version of Joy and Kyle's live interview, moderated by Regina G. Barber, at this year's Library of Congress National Book Festival.

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Transcript

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0:15.2	seasight for details.
0:17.9	You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.
0:25.0	Hey Short Waivers, Regina Barbara here, and we have a special episode for you today.
0:27.0	One recorded at the National Book Festival,
0:30.0	an annual event hosted by the Library of Congress.
0:33.0	Hey, how's everyone doing?
0:38.0	There I had the honor of moderating a panel on algorithms,
0:42.0	specifically how computer algorithms are everywhere.
0:45.0	We experience a lot of mediation in culture now when we watch a TV show through Netflix or listen to a song through Spotify like all of this digital
0:55.0	technology has become a kind of filter. That's Kyle Chaca, a staff writer at the
0:59.9	New Yorker and the author of the book Filter World, how algorithms flatten culture.
1:05.3	And okay, all of that sounds fancy and new.
1:08.3	Algorithm is this kind of buzzy word people like to toss around because it shows how it
1:12.3	integrates with technology.
1:14.2	But Kyle says that algorithms, they can do things like find new songs on Spotify, yes, but at
1:19.5	the end of the day they're very basic.
1:21.8	They've been around since the Babylonians who made equations
1:24.8	to calculate all sorts of things like the volume of dirt dug up to make a ditch.
	...

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