99.99% of the time a change means nothing or more accurately nothing that is actionable or even understandable to a program or algo much less moi.
A recent example is the word "technocracy" and the variants "technocratic" and "technocrat".
Here are three stories that dropped out of the feedreaders where the terms appeared over the last few months.
From the Washington Post, Aug 17:
Silicon Valley's attempts to self-police are anti-democratic. They're also not new
At first glance, it looks to be any other Fourth of July parade in the faded Kodachrome photos. That is, until subtle details begin to pop: the uniformed marchers handing out pamphlets, the yin-yang emblem adorning banners, the fleet of identical gray automobiles driving in slow procession.
“Operation Golden Gate” was the name of a 1948 plan among the followers of a political movement known as Technocracy Inc. to converge on the San Francisco Bay area. These self-described Technocrats gathered from around the country to educate the public in their central belief: that politicians lacked the ability to effectively manage the complexities of the modern world and that the public should delegate decision-making instead to a small group of technological experts.
Some of the Technocrats’ more fanciful proposals included a 16-hour workweek, equal income for all in the form of energy certificates, and the unification of North and Central American nations into the Technate of America. But Technocracy’s iconography — its militaristic marches, insignia, uniforms and salutes — wasn’t about to win any hearts soon after the defeat of fascism in Europe. The 1948 parade through San Francisco, Palo Alto, Santa Clara, and San Jose was one of the final public displays of this obscure techno-utopianism that was soon to fizzle out. The Technocrats packed up their cars and headed home after this holiday weekend in what would soon be called Silicon Valley.
There, after years of dormancy, the Technocratic ethos appears to have reemerged as the dominant response to concerns as diverse as fake news, data privacy and smartphone addiction. As public grievances mount against the few tech companies determining how we connect with and understand the world around us, concrete proposals for action are coming from those companies themselves, rather than from lawmakers. In the absence of a functioning regulatory apparatus in the United States, Silicon Valley is stepping in to police itself, as if restoring trust in the public sphere were any other kind of scheduled maintenance.
Technocracy Inc. promoted a philosophy that required treating the public as passive users rather than active citizens, and so far, the solutions put forward by the tech industry have taken a similar approach. As a nation trying to understand what has become of democratic consensus in an age of increasing fragmentation, this anti-democratic approach is precisely the opposite of what we need.
Politicians, for their part, have been vocal about tech industry overreach. In the wake of revelations about Cambridge Analytica, Facebook’s data sharing and election hacking, governments around the world are holding hearings on social media and user privacy protections. The coming months will surely see a slow-moving clash between the ideals of representative government and the Technocratic vision of expert management. But in many ways, it feels as if the Technocratic vision has already won.Luigi Zingales at Chicago Booth's ProMarket blog,
While the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation recently caused countless sites with poor user protections to go dark across Europe, the legislation took six years to come to fruition. President Barack Obama’s “Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights,” also proposed in 2012, suffered attacks on all sides and never left the drawing board. More recently, April’s Facebook hearings on Capitol Hill have resulted in two overlapping pieces of legislation . But it’s unlikely that either will get traction in a dysfunctional Congress, especially as politicians joke that they can understand only half of what they hear during tech hearings.
Meanwhile, as the public begins to fall out of love with its gadgets, Silicon Valley is rushing to make amends. Former engineers and investors have formed the Center for Humane Technology to “reverse the digital attention crisis.” The San Francisco-based nonprofit Common Sense Media has been airing a public service ad campaign called “Truth About Tech.” Even Facebook has been so willing to humble itself that it modified News Feed to promote “more meaningful social interactions” — and as a result is seeing the first-ever drop in time spent on the now slightly less addictive platform....MORE
Paul Tucker on Unelected Power: A Technocrat against Technocracy
And finally, from Inside Philanthropy, May 24, 2018:
Data for What? Mike Bloomberg and the Limits of Technocratic Philanthropy
What does it mean? Ya got me.
Completely different sources, completely different topics.
A look at GoogleTrends for "Technocracy" searches worldwide at the one and five year levels shows a slight downtrend in searches and for the U.S. only a modest uptick and that only at five years:
Sometimes the computers do what the computers do.
A couple prior posts that relate to the problem.
Bloomberg, September 26, 2017:
The Massive Hedge Fund Betting on AI
The second paragraph of the story:
...Man Group, which has about $96 billion under management, typically takes its most promising ideas from testing to trading real money within weeks. In the fast-moving world of modern finance, an edge today can be gone tomorrow. The catch here was that, even as the new software produced encouraging returns in simulations, the engineers couldn’t explain why the AI was executing the trades it was making. The creation was such a black box that even its creators didn’t fully understand how it worked. That gave Ellis pause. He’s not an engineer and wasn’t intimately involved in the technology’s creation, but he instinctively knew that one explanation—“I can’t tell you why …”—would never fly with big clients looking for answers when Man inevitably lost some of their money...That was part of a broader look at "We Might Be Getting Closer To Understanding How True 'Black Box' AI Makes Decisions" November 7, 2017.
One more, August 2016:
Artificial Intelligence: "How This Hedge Fund Robot Outsmarted Its Human Master"
Not wanting to go all quasi-mystical on patient reader, and keeping in mind the admonition from 2014's "Chartology: Monster “Mega-Phone” pattern breakout near?" on seeing things that aren't really there:
You have to be careful with this stuff.So as the man said, "It's probably nothing."
Humans are pattern-recognizing machines and are so good at it that we can see patterns that don't even exist.* In the instant case you really have to beware of imputing meaning to lines on charts; the reason technical analysis has any validity at all is because of "market memory" one example of which is resistance to upmoves caused by prior investors waiting to "get even and get out" and supplying stock to the market.
(one of the reasons to like new highs, no overhead supply)...
But keep an eye peeled for the technocrats.
See also:
MIT Creates A Psychopath AI Algorithm
