week 2
Algorithm designers must instead achieve some threshold of operator or user satisfaction — understood in the model, perhaps, in terms of percent clicks on the top results, or percentage of correctly identified human faces from digital images.(when algorithms learned how to write)
Is algorithm threatening the human? This is a question that often been asked.
I want to use games as an example: algorithms know how to make people addicted. I recently became addicted to a mobile game called Two Dots, which I downloaded by accident for a course on game logic and spent at least five hours a day playing it. It's not a complex game, the interface is clean and simple, and the rules grow with the number of levels. But why is it so fascinating? Because the algorithm is set up accurately so that the possibility of winning is somewhere between challenging and continuous . The algorithm set it into a not easy-to-win mode, so I can only buy tokens ton achieve my desire of winning.
Then I started thinking about how do algorithms actually threaten me? It made me addicted to spending time and money, that’s because it found my weakness. It hooked me. So who is the least threatened by the game's algorithm? It must be the elderly, since they are not heavy phone users.
I think what we need to do is not to blame technology, but to think about where are our weaknesses, how do we give the algorithms an opportunity to beat us ? The algorithm itself doesn’t have thinking ability, algorithms just follow instructions. The greatest threat to us is our age's insatiable desires. Self-control has been neglected while technology has been condemned. Only by knowing your weaknesses, you can benefit and enjoy from the technology.