The Algorithmic View.

Being an ex art school moto-crosser and mildly dyslectic smoker the algorithmic life is foreign to me but there are many who ‘know’ from past experience the workings of the world. That needs unpacking. Algorithms are a “precise set of rules specifying how to solve some problem”, and the lifeblood of computing machines. Art school is where you learn to be unruly, moto-cross is where you ride the unruly, dyslexia is unruly reading and smoking is the last bastion of the unruly. Nevertheless men over the centuries have tried to understand the rules of their problems in order to solve them. Up until fifty years ago there was a working balance between the rule makers and the unruly but in the 60’s computers provided the opportunity to process masses of complex algorithms in moments. Quite suddenly algorithms of every description, driving washing machines to the whole financial world, surrounded us and, just like if one were surrounded by teapots one would begin to think in terms of teapots, we began to think algorithmically. Now an algorithm depends on historical data to build its rule set so thinking algorithmically builds the present from the past. If you think this is irrelevant consider art and pop music of now and fifty years ago. Before it had energy and diversity but now it’s recursive, its dynamism replaced by simple forcefulness. And because the past can only be added to by the present, building the present on the past leads to both becoming an unchangeable algorithmic stasis. In fact much algorithmic work was done on how to reflect in the governance of our human society this ‘balance of nature.’ Unfortunately this mythical balance of nature is simply that nature continues to exist and adjust whatever happens. It’s not in balance, it’s simply robust. There’s a fundamental difference between algorithm-based balance and robustness: Only one is robust. To observe algorithmic thinking watch a politician, sportsman, presenter and try to see the algorithms they’re running. “These are the precise set of rules to solve my problem.” It’s unlikely we’ll fall pray to ‘The Return of the Body Snatchers’ but we may well be welcoming in ‘The Mind Reducers’, the computers that beckon us to process as they do.