I had never heard of Aeon but they seem to have taken on a rather large remit (or is it ambit?).
From Aeon:
Computers could take some tough choices out of our hands, if we let them. Is there still a place for human judgement?
'When Garry Kasparov lost his second match against the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue in 1997, people predicted that computers would eventually destroy chess.' Photo by Jeffrey Sylvester
In central London this spring, eight of the world’s greatest minds performed on a dimly lit stage in a wood-panelled theatre. An audience of hundreds watched in hushed reverence. This was the closing stretch of the 14-round Candidates’ Tournament, to decide who would take on the current chess world champion, Viswanathan Anand, later this year.*e.g. See:
Each round took a day: one game could last seven or eight hours. Sometimes both players would be hunched over their board together, elbows on table, splayed fingers propping up heads as though to support their craniums against tremendous internal pressure. At times, one player would lean forward while his rival slumped back in an executive leather chair like a bored office worker, staring into space. Then the opponent would make his move, stop his clock, and stand up, wandering around to cast an expert glance over the positions in the other games before stalking upstage to pour himself more coffee. On a raised dais, inscrutable, sat the white-haired arbiter, the tournament’s presiding official. Behind him was a giant screen showing the four current chess positions. So proceeded the fantastically complex slow-motion violence of the games, and the silently intense emotional theatre of their players.
When Garry Kasparov lost his second match against the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue in 1997, people predicted that computers would eventually destroy chess, both as a contest and as a spectator sport. Chess might be very complicated but it is still mathematically finite. Computers that are fed the right rules can, in principle, calculate ideal chess variations perfectly, whereas humans make mistakes. Today, anyone with a laptop can run commercial chess software that will reliably defeat all but a few hundred humans on the planet. Isn’t the spectacle of puny humans playing error-strewn chess games just a nostalgic throwback?
Such a dismissive attitude would be in tune with the spirit of the times. Our age elevates the precision-tooled power of the algorithm over flawed human judgment. From web search to marketing and stock-trading, and even education and policing, the power of computers that crunch data according to complex sets of if-then rules is promised to make our lives better in every way. Automated retailers will tell you which book you want to read next; dating websites will compute your perfect life-partner; self-driving cars will reduce accidents; crime will be predicted and prevented algorithmically. If only we minimise the input of messy human minds, we can all have better decisions made for us. So runs the hard sell of our current algorithm fetish.
If we let cars do the driving, we are outsourcing not only our motor control but also our moral judgmentBut in chess, at least, the algorithm has not displaced human judgment. The imperfectly human players who contested the last round of the Candidates’ Tournament — in a thrilling finish that, thanks to unusual tiebreak rules, confirmed the 22-year-old Norwegian Magnus Carlsen as the winner, ahead of former world champion Vladimir Kramnik — were watched by an online audience of 100,000 people. In fact, the host of the streamed coverage, the chatty and personable international master Lawrence Trent, pointedly refused to use a computer engine (which he called ‘the beast’) for his own analyses and predictions. The idea, he explained, is to try to figure things out for yourself. During a break in the commentary room on the day I was there, Trent was eating crisps and still eagerly discussing variations with his plummily amusing co-presenter, Nigel Short (who himself had contested the World Championship against Kasparov in 1993). ‘He’ll find Qf4; it’s not difficult to find,’ Short assured Trent. ‘Ng8, then it’s…’ ‘It’s game over.’ ‘Game over!’
Chess is an Olympian battle of wits. As with any sport, the interest lies in watching profoundly talented humans operating at the limits of their capability. There does exist a cyborg version of the game, dubbed ‘advanced chess’, in which humans are allowed to use computers while playing. But it is profoundly boring to watch, like a contest over who can use spreadsheet software more effectively, and hasn’t caught on. The ‘beast’ can be a useful helpmeet — Veselin Topalov, a previous challenger for Anand’s world title, used a 10,000-CPU monster in his preparation for that match, which he still lost — but it’s never going to be the main event.
This is a lesson that the algorithm-boosters in the wider culture have yet to learn. And outside the Platonically pure cosmos of chess, when we seek to hand over our decision-making to automatic routines in areas that have concrete social and political consequences, the results might be troubling indeed.
At first thought, it seems like a pure futuristic boon — the idea of a car that drives itself, currently under development by Google. Already legal in Nevada, Florida and California, computerised cars will be able to drive faster and closer together, reducing congestion while also being safer. They’ll drop you at your office then go and park themselves. What’s not to like? Well, for a start, as the mordant critic of computer-aided ‘solutionism’ Evgeny Morozov points out, the consequences for urban planning might be undesirable to some. ‘Would self-driving cars result in inferior public transportation as more people took up driving?’ he wonders in his new book, To Save Everything, Click Here (2013).
More recently, Gary Marcus, professor of psychology at New York University, offered a vivid thought experiment in The New Yorker. Suppose you are in a self-driving car going across a narrow bridge, and a school bus full of children hurtles out of control towards you. There is no room for the vehicles to pass each other. Should the self-driving car take the decision to drive off the bridge and kill you in order to save the children?...MORE
So, You Coded A Video Game, Sold Twenty Million Copies, Made A Hundred Million Bucks (last year) and You're Swedish
The Number One Skill For The Next Generation Of Billionaires
In Demand: "Hounded By Recruiters, Coders Put Themselves Up For Auction"
"How do you get a quant job on Wall Street?..."
"Can You Still Become a Quant in Your 30's?"
