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Comment by bwang29 | Hacker News Reader

Just imagine one day, some algorithms completely take control of/help us decide what we eat, who we date, where to travel, who we talk to or make friends with, what job offer to take, what subjects to study in school, what startup ideas to invent.

Then imagine that 100 year later, the original developers of these intricate algorithms retired, passed away, complex system got maintained by automated tools and programs, and the outcome of these algorithms become more and more obscure.

Eventually, the complex machines and A.I. algorithms will be looked as mysteries to our grand grand grand children and they will study them as we're studying nature today..

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To the nontechnical we’ve already built god. A fav anecdote of mine is somebody once asked their Lyft driver how their day is going. And the driver replies: I have been blessed by the algorithm. It brings me much rides.

If you have no mental models of how these things work, they may well be gods and the people who make them may well be high priests performing mysterious incantantions to bend the gods to their will.

Kinda scary.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gods_Must_Be_Crazy

Brought into a modern era where , in a world with $50 Android phones and cheap/free Facebook "free basics" walled garden internet, people who are only one generation removed from subsistence farming lifestyles are suddenly encountering meme warfare and predictive algorithms.

I love that movie! I watched it as a kid and to this day I remember two important facts:

1) Everyone recognizes a Coca Cola bottle

2) To defeat a hyena you must appear to be taller than the hyena

And this is how the Cult Mechanicus begins. :)

> what job offer to take

... or be offered.

Part of Google Cloud Job Discovery is letting seekers find jobs ... the other is getting the "jobs in front of the right candidates." Does this sound familiar? It seems like another opportunity for an individual seeker to be put in an algorithmic jail, with opaqueness and little recourse we usually expect from Google.

> algorithmic jail

Not sure if that's succinctly prescient or absurdly reductionist. But it would certainly describe the age we have entered.

Literal algorithmic jail is coming, too, as in: prison sentences handed out with humans completely out of the loop. This will so obviously and inevitably happen it doesn’t even seem worth typing.

yeah, evolution deals with "dna-jail" by mutating to a certain degree. and we already see that in the recommended clips algorithm by YT. we are occasionally offered stuff from outside your bubble.

> Google Cloud Job Discovery

I thought that had to be a joke, but it's not. It even "...improve[s] job site engagement and candidate conversion," so it's fully adtech buzzword compliant.

Wait till we get fully AI controlled offensive and defensive weapons and nobody can turn them off because then the enemy would win and we live in this state of permanent AI killer robot vs. AI killer robot warfare.

>Just imagine one day, some algorithms completely take control of/help us decide what we eat, who we date, where to travel, who we talk to or make friends with, what job offer to take, what subjects to study in school, what startup ideas to invent.

Yes, I want this in my smartphone. It's like a life coach. I don't like to make decisions or plans. Should be outsourced to an algorithm. I need to google for this.

There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

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