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The Algorithms Are Reading Us
They are ravenous. They can never be satiated. They are relentless and sleepless. They guzzle water and they feed off our power grids as they scurry about. They are everywhere in the digital aether. In our cars, our phones, our TVs, traffic lights, laptops, tablets. They are in our fridges, ovens and our toothbrushes. They are algorithms and they are reading us.
That the algorithms are reading us is high on the creepy scale and certainly needs regulatory oversight, but this might not be as scary as we think.
We’ve long known we’ve been monitored, every click we make recorded. Stored mixed, mashed and entered into a digital ledger. Companies call us “personas” and we are aggregated, while at the same time defined as a digital half-formed twin. Our personas are traded by data exchanges. We are sold and resold. We only realize this when we are served up an ad for something we said just moments ago.
There is an ever growing swarm of algorithms and they are reading us. Perhaps though, the oddest thing of all is that though these algorithms may read us, they don’t understand us. And the personas they help to form, aren’t really a mirror of us, they are, more often than not, entirely wrong about us.
Algorithms may feed what they find back to dimly lit digital dens, but all they know what we have done. They don’t and likely never will, know why we did something. An assumption long held in the hallowed halls of Silicon Valley thinkers is that humanity can, and individuals can, be reduced to algorithms themselves. This is culture on a diet.
A prevailing idea of the transhumanist movement is that we will someday upload our minds to a server and live on for eternity, teasing our great, great, great grandchildren. That our brains can be copied like a photocopier. This idea goes far back in time to the Enlightenment when the theory was that the brain is separate from the body. The idea in Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein.
We are learning however, that may not in fact, be quite possible. We now know the gut and the brain are deeply intertwined, that both bacteria and viruses play a deep role in our mental health and perhaps, some are theorizing, play a role in our intelligence and most importantly, consciousness.
