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We need a word or phrase for this phenomenon, where we attempt to substitute human pattern recognition with algorithms that just aren't up to the job. Facebook

We need a word or phrase for this phenomenon, where we attempt to substitute human pattern recognition with algorithms that just aren't up to the job. Facebook moderation, Tesla Full Self Driving, the War Games movie, arrests for mistaken facial identification. It's becoming an increasingly dystopic force in our lives and will likely get much worse before getting even worse. So it needs a label. Maybe there's a ten syllable German word that expresses it perfectly?

MontyCarloHall 5y ago
Artifactual Intelligence?
- inter_netuser 5y ago
  Actual Idiocy
- verdverm 5y ago
  Anti intelligence?
themodelplumber 5y ago
Artifice Intelligence
- visarga 5y ago
  Artificial stupidity.
  - inter_netuser 5y ago
    Artful Stupidity might go down better.
Kalium 5y ago
There's The Scunthorpe Problem, which seems like a specific instance.
stiGGG 5y ago
Roboterflegelhaftigkeiten
- dylan604 5y ago
  My first thought was we should have the Germans create this new word.
acituan 5y ago
Artificial Intelligibility. We are often reduced to mere conformity to what the artificial intelligence can make sense of. Captcha: "Are you human?" Human: <Goes on to do a simple perceptual task even a cat could do if they had fingers>
remolacha 5y ago
Artificial Intelligence
crvdgc 5y ago
Scunthorpe problem [1] is used to describe the false positives for auto filters, which are often results of naive substring matching. In a way, the current problem is similar, but on the semantic level. However, it doesn't cover other cases for other AI mistakes you mentioned, like self-driving. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem
- runarberg 5y ago
  The problem also goes in the other direction. That is platform rely too much on automation that human signal gets too faint. For example humans have a hard time flagging actual hate speech on these platforms as well. Another example: Every so often there is a front page post on HN where a company like Google will automatically shut down service for a customer (false positive). The customer has a hard time getting through and having this false positive corrected because their signal can’t reach through the layers of automation.
jMyles 5y ago
Artificial Unintelligence? Artificial Stupidity?
computerlab 5y ago
The concept of "so-so automation" [1] seems relevant: innovation that allows a business or organization to eliminate human employees, but doesn't result in overall productivity gains or cost savings for society that could then be redistributed to the laid-off employees. I think so-so automation often is used places where there's a lot of zero-sum conflict between workers and management, or where the work itself causes a lot of negative human externalities. (This can be a good thing: it's probably okay to settle for a "worse result" from an automated system if it eliminates a lot of physical or psychological harm to people...some content moderation issues probably fall under this case, but not this one.) [1] https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/lure-so-so-technology-and-how-to-avoid-it https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/lure-so-so-tec...
- cmehdy 5y ago
  As a non-native English speaker I read "so-so automation" like "sus-automation" and found it oddly appropriate.
- Spooky23 5y ago
  I’d call it “plausible automation”. It enabled things like Facebook to displace message boards for the most part. Look at Facebook or Reddit, they are barely able to police obvious noxious behavior in English, and military juntas in Myanmar are able to organize on the platforms.
jcims 5y ago
It's basically perception and reaction without cognition. In the natural world we would call that instinct. So maybe 'artificial instinct' if we want to keep 'AI' or 'synthetic instinct' because I think it sounds better.
- sennight 5y ago
  It is basically about using the wrong tool for the job, and continuing to do so even after you (and everyone else) is fully aware of just how wrong you are. Personifying the tool would just distract from the root cause. "I was using a ballpeen hammer to pound in roofing nails, everything was going great until the hammer's 'synthetic instinct' resulted in a painful blow to my groin and a near fatal three story drop. It'll go better next time - I've painted the ballpeen hammer a different color."
sergiotapia 5y ago
Fauxtomation
Barrin92 5y ago
I don't have a word for the phenomenon, but the problem reminds me of a quote by Wilfrid Sellars. "The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term" call it maybe philosophy-lacking, or worldview-lacking, but understanding how things 'hang together' in broad terms is precisely what our 'intelligent' systems cannot do. Agents in the world have an integrated point of view, they're not assemblages of models, and there seems to be very little interest than to build anything but the latter.
TroisM 5y ago
> We need a word or phrase for this phenomenon, where we attempt to substitute human pattern recognition with algorithms that just aren't up to the job. Facebook moderation, Tesla Full Self Driving, the War Games movie, arrests for mistaken facial identification. It's becoming an increasingly dystopic force in our lives and will likely get much worse before getting even worse. So it needs a label. Maybe there's a ten syllable German word that expresses it perfectly? "Fuck the world" is all I can think of in this context
GoOnThenDoTell 5y ago
Sloppy Intelligence
nirui 5y ago
Industrial revolutions has happened few times in the past, and every time it occurs, we change our world to adopt it. I can't help but wonder, what the world would look like if services in the future will be provided primarily by AIs. How do we adopt them? Do we have to invent a "New Speech" just to make AI understand us better so we can live a easier life? "Question: Have you consumed your food today?", "Answer: I have consumed my food today." Or a more subtle example: "Hi! Welcome to ___. What do you want to eat today?", "I want to eat item one, fifty-six, eighty-seven and ninety-one", "Do you want to eat item one, fifty-six, eighty-seven and ninety-one?", "Yes", "Please make a seat. The food will come right away!" (all without making any Hmm or Err noise)
- chii 5y ago
  > "Hi! Welcome to ___. What do you want to eat today?", "I want to eat item one, fifty-six, eighty-seven and ninety-one", "Do you want to eat item one, fifty-six, eighty-seven and ninety-one?", "Yes", "Please make a seat. The food will come right away!" (all without making any Hmm or Err noise) this already happens today, with human servers. The menu items are numbered, and you tell them the number instead of the name of the dish.
  - bob1029 5y ago
    And then in some places they hand you another number - a pooled session identifier - to take to your table. Then you are expected to respond to events broadcast regarding this number if the food fails to reach the destination automatically.
- jcims 5y ago
  We're going to resurrect the transatlantic accent. I already have started add a hard 'ng' on 'going to' because my phone keeps abbreviating it to 'gonna'.
  - guerrilla 5y ago
    Yeah that's probably not goinv to work for India and the rest of the anglosphere.
visarga 5y ago
There's an acronym: OOD - out of distribution - for these situations. There's no reason YT can't detect chess from hate speech if they updated their training set. Maybe they weren't aware of this failure case, or they didn't get to fix it, or by trying to fix it they caused more false negatives. The way they assign cost to a false positive vs a false negative is also related.
ifyoubuildit 5y ago
A-I-opia. Think like myopia or hyperopia.
human 5y ago
We definitely need a term for this so when we are a victim of this, we can easily raise a flag. I have a few ideas: - Bot blunder - Artificial stupidity - Algofail - Machine madness - Neural slip
- canadaduane 5y ago
  Artificial Stupidity stands out to me. Nice one!
Gibbon1 5y ago
In economics there is Goodhart's law. 'Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
verdverm 5y ago
AI ~ Attempted intelligence
undersuit 5y ago
Have you heard of the "expert beginner"? Maybe something like that. https://daedtech.com/how-developers-stop-learning-rise-of-the-expert-beginner/ https://daedtech.com/how-developers-stop-learning-rise-of-th...
runarberg 5y ago
In a government system a similar problem is called Bureaucracy. It is similar in the sense that the system is very complex, beyond any single persons comprehension, bureaucratic system is unforgiving in its conclusion, and it is the responsibility of the victim to deal with a false positive using the same (or similarly complex) system to attempt correction. However this is different from bureaucracy in the level of automation and statistical inference. A bureaucratic system doesn’t do inference (or at least that is not its main function), and the steps between require human inputs (albeit really automated humans most of the time). I suggest automatacracy which strings together automation and bureaucracy.
- dgb23 5y ago
  Computer says No!
- nicbou 5y ago
  Why not algocracy or robocracy?
SquibblesRedux 5y ago
A receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC curve) [1] describes the tradeoff between sensitivity and recall. No matter how sophisticated we think our classifiers are, the confluence of physics and mathematics will always limit the accuracy of our automated systems. It is just a matter of what kinds of errors we are willing to tolerate. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Receiver_operating_characteristic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Receiver_operating_characteris...
mellosouls 5y ago
Not quite the same situation, but "Malgorithms" is used by Private Eye (British satirical/political magazine) to highlight adverts auto-generated inappropriately to accompany articles on news etc websites. Example: https://twitter.com/joshspero/status/562625460732174336 https://twitter.com/joshspero/status/562625460732174336
- joelbondurant 5y ago
  I love malgorithms having been exposed to the malicious grift of the healthcare industry.
- hutzlibu 5y ago
  Of all the suggestions, I like the "Malgorithms" the most. It is catchy, easy to read and probably understandable by normal people as well.
  - BoxOfRain 5y ago
    Yeah, it's definitely the most sellable one I've seen. I don't like the implication that it's the algorithm that's malicious rather than the person who wrote the algorithm (no algorithm is inherently malevolent or benevolent in my opinion, it's just an algorithm), but I also know this distinction is completely pointless for the vast majority of people and "malgorithm" gets the gist of what people are getting at across very well.
    - saalweachter 5y ago
      While "malevolent"/"malicious" definitely has a "wicked" connotation, you also see it in words like "maladapted" or "malodorous" which are just "bad" without the "wickedness".
      - BoxOfRain 5y ago
        That's still dumping a "bad" on the poor old algorithm though, which has done nothing wrong simply by existing and doing what it is programmed to do. Algorithms aren't bad, it's the programmers who write them and the managers who decide they should be written who are bad when things like this happen.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
noodles_nomore 5y ago
"Cheap AI"/"cheap automation", to dispel the notion that throwing data at a neural network is high science or serious engineering. Or, even more directly, reduce it to "fuzzy matching". AI is just a fuzzy pattern database.
biztos 5y ago
10 might be inelegant, or not... Rechenunmenschtauglichkeitsempfindung! /ex-germanist :-)
howaboutnope 5y ago
> It's becoming an increasingly dystopic force in our lives and will likely get much worse before getting even worse. So it needs a label. It's not just something that happens to us, it's something we do. We need to do better rather than accepting it as inevitable, and let future generations worry about what the best name for it was. > Maybe there's a ten syllable German word that expresses it perfectly? That being said, I propose Urteilsfähigkeitsauslagerungsnekrose: The necrosis that follows the outsourcing of our capability of judgement.
- laurent92 5y ago
  11 syllables, almost as requested ;) May I suggest “yacht-feet automation”? It focuses on increasing the yacht feet of Zuckerberg, and doesn’t do anything else right?
  - burning_hamster 5y ago
    Jachtverlängerungsautomatisierung ;-) Also 11 sylabels.
    - hef19898 5y ago
      Man, German can be such a nice, beautiful language for stuff like that!
  - remram 5y ago
    "It's not a feature, it's just another yacht foot". I like it.
- Symbiote 5y ago
  > Urteilsfähigkeitsauslagerungsnekrose Post-reason-delegation necrosis? But English is always a bit awkward for this sort of thing.
johnsonyuen 5y ago
False positive?
- blablablerg 5y ago
  This is the term for it, but probably not sexy enough when I read all the other suggestions.
Lutzb 5y ago
Superficial Intelligence.
mellosouls 5y ago
Artificial Due Diligence
notyourday 5y ago
No. What we need is something that is amazingly simple: * you, a programmer who coded something that caused company X to lose Y dollars because of a "mistake", have to be on a hook for Y dollars. * you, a manager who managed a project that caused a company X to lose Y dollars because of a "mistake" by your programmer, have to be on a hook for Y dollars. * you, a product owner who accepted the what the manager of ta project that caused a company X to lose Y dollars because of a "mistake" by your programmer, have to be on a hook for Y dollars. * you, the CEO of the company that had a product owner who accepted the what the manager of ta project that caused a company X to lose Y dollars because of a "mistake" by your programmer, have to be on a hook for Y dollars. Yes, I understand that the cost of a mistake is now higher than the loss suffered by X. That's the incentive to ensure that it does not happen because the wives or husbands or partners of the people who would now have to pay are going to ensure that they do not do take that whose wacky ideas and implement them -- wacky ideas are abstract but the loss of nice housing, nice organic food, nice daycare for the kids and nice scholarship fun is real.
- selcuka 5y ago
  Start punishing mistakes and you will soon have a hard time finding good people to employ. Only bad (and broke) ones will be available.
  - mrguyorama 5y ago
    Funny, we hold civil engineers accountable and there seem to be plenty of capable engineers to do things that need to be done, and we hold bad pilots accountable, and yet the only reason airlines have a pilot shortage is because they refuse to pay more than $20k a year. Developers need to stop being so allergic to accountability. It's kind of pathetic
    - selcuka 5y ago
      I studied mechanical engineering myself, so I hear you. That being said, software development and civil engineering are very different in terms of risk management. There are strict regulations around what you do and if you play by the rules, you have minimum to no risk. Even if dozens of people die under a collapsing building you are not accountable if everything you had done was by the book. Software development, on the other hand, is more like wild west. There are minimal regulations, only best practices. One developer can never know if the end product is free of any errors. Pilots are a completely different story. The OP was talking about "causing company X to lose Y dollars", not human lives.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
smsm42 5y ago
Artificial Stupidity?
8note 5y ago
I think it's just called machine learning. They're all gonna run into awkward edge cases here and there. Tbh, so do people. Somebody whos not familiar with chess or board games could think the same thing
- baremetal 5y ago
  that makes it okay then? ignorance is strength!
mirkules 5y ago
It's funny that you should mention War Games, because the only way to win this battle is not to play at all. Why are we so hell-bent on restricting speech and burning all these engineering hours trying to moderate something that cannot be moderated? Languages -- and people -- are "transformable" enough to avoid triggering "hate speech" (whatever that actually is, and whoever it is that determines it) algorithms. Let people downvote or shut their computer off if they don't like it, and leave it at that. Are we that scared of words or ideas? I used to live in a communist country (probably the same one that Mr. Radic lives/lived in), where "hate speech" -- which was called anti-state, or anti-establishment speech back then -- was punishable by a middle-of-the-night visit by dark-clad police. Yet, people still found ways to openly criticize the Party, and there were even popular songs that openly defied them, which only demonstrates that not even human pattern recognition is good enough to detect these things, as you state in your first sentence. It's a waste of time, but more importantly it is detrimental to society.
- Gibbon1 5y ago
  > Why are we so hell-bent on restricting speech and burning all these engineering hours trying to moderate something that cannot be moderated? Because if you allow humans to moderate then those humans start acquiring power. Which is something FAANG companies strive to prevent at all costs.
  - mirkules 5y ago
    So instead put power in the hands of giant companies because regular people can’t be bothered to not get hot-and-bothered by reading something they don’t like? What makes these companies so morally pure? The only way this can make sense - especially on HN - is if the people who advocate for company control of regular peoples’ lives work at these companies.
- robrenaud 5y ago
  I am scared of the masses believing nonsense. What fraction of Americans believe the election was stolen? How many people are still going to refuse to be vaccinated? Indeed, bad ideas are scary. I am scared that my country people will lead another insurrection or allow themselves to be a needlessly vulnerable vector for highly transmissible and dangerous virus. Misinformation spreads like wildfire. The notion that good speech counters bad speech relies on rational, well informed, critical thinking skills that are lacking in a significant portion of the populace. It is fundamentally different that a company wants to exercise its right to free speech in choosing what is said on its platform than for a government to use free speech as a fig leaf cover for dissent. Putting up no fight against misinformation and hate speech is not a winning strategy. Society loses much more from nonsense spreading than it does from having to wait 24 hours for high quality chess content to get remoderated.
wolpoli 5y ago
I would call it an "algorithmic oopsies" for the inevitable non-apology when the situation appears on the front page of a major news outlet.
- formerly_proven 5y ago
  > Ooopsie woopsie! Our AI made a fucky wucky and locked your account for no reason lol. We pwomise nothing pls go away and die uwu PS: If you make a new account we gonna shadowban iwt immediately lmao, if you have any compwaints please write a letter and addwess it to the hospital you were born in.
hkopp 5y ago
In my opinion this is not just about AI. This is more general. We as humans try to fix social issues with technical measures. All the racists are not going to suddenly become good people if we push them to separate platforms.
- zpeti 5y ago
  Yes but at least you won’t be labeled as conspiracy spreading platforms by the /very important/ media, and your woke employees won’t walk out and disappear. Oh and the current administration won’t pass legislation restricting your platforms or revoking article 230.
  - burnished 5y ago
    sorry, are you railing against freedom of association? because it sounds like you are. if you're an insufferable ass (hypothetically speaking) and no one wants to work for you, and so they do not, thats freedom baby.
alpaca128 5y ago
Context-Free Judgement
mleonhard 5y ago
If a human made the same mistake, we would call them incompetent, careless, and negligent. - incompetent system - incompetent robot - incompesys - incompebot - inept system - inept robot - inepsys - ineptobot - inepobot - bunglebot - hambot - sloppybot - careless system - careless robot - carelessys - carelessbot - neglisys - negligent robot - neglibot I like 'neglibot'. "YouTube neglibotted my video." "This is my new email address. My old one got neglibotted." "The app works for typing in data, but the camera feature is neglibotty." "They spent a lot of effort and turned their neglibot automod into carefulbot. In another year it may be meticubot.
- nxpnsv 5y ago
  Neglibot is nice. Dumbot works too...
  - drran 5y ago
    IMHO, it's a case when a bug in an Artificial Intelligence system produces the Artificial Idiot, so "AIdiot", or "AdIot"
    - nxpnsv 5y ago
      Perhaps Artificial Stupid System, you do the acronym yourself...
  - llimos 5y ago
    I love Dumbot. Has a beautiful ring to it. Can definitely see it catching on
    - dylan604 5y ago
      Dumbot works with the Carlin rule of improving the word by putting fucking in the middle: dumfuckingbot
- drran 5y ago
  Slightly related new word: "copiloting" - copying by AI (copy + looting), e.g. GitHub copiloted opensource code.
Hackbraten 5y ago
Verschlimmbesserautomatisierung. Composite noun of verschlimmbessern [1] and Automatisierung (automation). [1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/verschlimmbessern#German https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/verschlimmbessern#German
oncilogical 5y ago
Crapware.
dan_mctree 5y ago
I figured it would be appropriate to ask an AI to come up with a label. So I prompted GPT-J with: AI has proven to be terrible at moderating human content, we felt we needed a word for these kinds of buggy systems and have chosen: " And GPT-J answered: "LOLPOP" Which seems to capture the spirit of unreliable AIs pretty well
Pinegulf 5y ago
There is such term as 'human error'. Thus suggestions: Machine error; Machine learning error; AI error; AI fail.
oldsecondhand 5y ago
Artificial Stupidity
mleonhard 5y ago
'starbot', from 'star chamber' [0]. "In modern times, legal or administrative bodies with strict, arbitrary rulings, no "due process" rights to those accused, and secretive proceedings are sometimes called "star chambers" as a metaphor." Example uses: "I got starbotted." "Instagram's automod is a starbot." "YouTube is too starbotty for your lectures. Better post with your school account." "We're suing them because their starbot took down our site right after our superbowl ad ran." "Play Store starbotted release 14 so we cut a dupe release 15. How much will it cost to push the ad campaign back 2 weeks?" "We use Gmail and Google Docs but not Google Cloud because of the starbots." "I tried to put Google ads on it, but their starbot rejected the site because it doesn't have enough pages. It's a single-page JavaScript utility." (This is my true story about https://www.cloudping.info https://www.cloudping.info ) "Our site gets a lot of traffic but we don't use Google ads because of the starbot risk. Nobody needs that trouble." "The STAHP Bill (Starbot Tempering by Adding Humans to Process) just passed the Senate! Big Tech is finally getting de-Kafka'ed. About f**ing time." [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Chamber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Chamber
eingaeKaiy8ujie 5y ago
Fascism.
kofko 5y ago
How about calling it a "Buttle" after the movie Brazil from 1985 where a certain Mr. "Buttle" gets arrested and killed instead of a Mr. "Tuttle" due to a fly in a teleprinter.
- b0rsuk 5y ago
  Nowhere near as popular as the skit with the vikings.
mlang23 5y ago
I use the phrase "K ohne I" since years already. Which basically means "künstlich ohne Intelligenz". We all saw this coming. The topic has been gone over in scifi literature. And still, big tech decided its time to roll it out. "A human would also not be perfect, and we claim this algo is better then the avg. human" is the last thing you hear before discriminating tech is rolled out. And since politics is in the grip of commerce, regulations will not happen early enough. We are fucked. 2040 will be horrible.
rowanG077 5y ago
It's not like humans are generally better then this. I mean look at the Github master branch fiasco. It had a completely different meaning then master with slavery connotations. Yet the outrage was so large Github changed this name. I'd say this is the same behavior of this algorithm. Seeing a word and getting "triggered" and marking it as toxic even though it has a completely different meaning.
- remram 5y ago
  AFAIK there was no outrage, GitHub started it.
thinkingemote 5y ago
How about "inhuman-ops" ? I think this has the unnatural, unjust and just basic wrongness about using AI to be like humans. "human-ops" is the justification to remove human pattern recognition because it's better for a small group of employees (e.g. "we cant let our expensive staff view flags of distressing pictures or boring chess videos, so we will get an algorithm instead". The tech companies HR say that this is pro mental health as an additional way to justify this change and any unemployment.
cowl 5y ago
It's easy to blame this on imperfect technology but I'm not so sure. Couple of months back when all tech companies started their holier than though publicity campaigns with token actions we faced the same issue. "Blacklist" was banned as term because it was deemed racist. No matter that people understand black and white outside the race issue. So if blacklist is deemed by people , not technology, as racist; thus removing context from the equation, why is AI wrong to assume that "attack the black soldier in C4" is hate speech?
- TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
  It's why feature extraction/stat bucket AI sucks. Human interactions have a social/cultural context. You can't just recognise $thing, you have to recognise how $thing depends on $context for the correct interpretation. Current AI either ignores context completely or doesn't parse it correctly. It's a rediscovery of the ancient "Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana" problem. If you're out on a date and you say "Let's go back to mine" it implies one thing. If you say it to some friends after an evening out it usually means something completely different. Sometimes it means the same thing - but you need to know a lot about the people involved to be able to infer that accurately. And sometimes humans can't parse these nuances accurately either. AI-by-grep or stat bucket can't handle them at all, because the inferences are contextual and specific to situations and/or individuals. They can't be extracted from just the words themselves. Minsky & co researched some of this in the 70s, and eventually it motivated the semantic web people. But it was too hard a problem for the technology of the time. Now it seems somewhat forgotten.
twic 5y ago
Autobungling?
adminscoffee 5y ago
hashstag
ctrlp 5y ago
"Totalitalgorithms" (Totalgorithms?) captures the spirit of these algorithms. They seem like bugs but they're actually undirected, organic features of a total technocratic political system that is rapidly coming to dominate life in our modern societies. The filters will be tuned but not fixed because they aren't broken. They're part of what Tocqueville described as 'soft despotism': "Thus, After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_despotism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_despotism
- washadjeffmad 5y ago
  Algorithmic totalitarianism resonates strongly. It's not a human rights violation if it isn't a human doing it!
  - dylan604 5y ago
    The human's rights were still violated even if it was a machine that did it.
saint_abroad 5y ago
Deep Neural Indifference - DNNs without emotional weights to guide behaviour and interactions. Leads to impaired empathy and lack of remorse.
voidhorse 5y ago
The suggested “malgorithms” is probably the best noun form for these algorithms themselves. As for terminology that captures society’s general over reliance on automation and algorithms to handle things that really ought to have direct human intervention, I like Rouvroy’s “algorithmic governmentality”
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
whatshisface 5y ago
The same phenomenon happens without computers when bureaucratic rules are applied senselessly.
mohi13 5y ago
The word is “False Positive”
beprogrammed 5y ago
AI: Artificial Ignorance
dominicl 5y ago
AS or just artificial stupidity I've heard a couple of times. It's quite mind boggling if you think about how many people had to engineer tensors and train networks for months if not years to create a system capable of so blatant stupidity.
sebazzz 5y ago
The problem of the flagging isn't so much of an issue, if it weren't for the fear that you don't know whether you can get an actual human being at Google to get in touch with you.

MontyCarloHall 5y ago

Artifactual Intelligence?

inter_netuser 5y ago
Actual Idiocy
verdverm 5y ago
Anti intelligence?

themodelplumber 5y ago

Artifice Intelligence

visarga 5y ago
Artificial stupidity.
- inter_netuser 5y ago
  Artful Stupidity might go down better.

Kalium 5y ago

There's The Scunthorpe Problem, which seems like a specific instance.

stiGGG 5y ago

Roboterflegelhaftigkeiten

dylan604 5y ago
My first thought was we should have the Germans create this new word.

acituan 5y ago

Artificial Intelligibility. We are often reduced to mere conformity to what the artificial intelligence can make sense of. Captcha: "Are you human?" Human: <Goes on to do a simple perceptual task even a cat could do if they had fingers>

remolacha 5y ago

Artificial Intelligence

crvdgc 5y ago

Scunthorpe problem [1] is used to describe the false positives for auto filters, which are often results of naive substring matching. In a way, the current problem is similar, but on the semantic level. However, it doesn't cover other cases for other AI mistakes you mentioned, like self-driving. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem

runarberg 5y ago
The problem also goes in the other direction. That is platform rely too much on automation that human signal gets too faint. For example humans have a hard time flagging actual hate speech on these platforms as well. Another example: Every so often there is a front page post on HN where a company like Google will automatically shut down service for a customer (false positive). The customer has a hard time getting through and having this false positive corrected because their signal can’t reach through the layers of automation.

jMyles 5y ago

Artificial Unintelligence? Artificial Stupidity?

computerlab 5y ago

The concept of "so-so automation" [1] seems relevant: innovation that allows a business or organization to eliminate human employees, but doesn't result in overall productivity gains or cost savings for society that could then be redistributed to the laid-off employees. I think so-so automation often is used places where there's a lot of zero-sum conflict between workers and management, or where the work itself causes a lot of negative human externalities. (This can be a good thing: it's probably okay to settle for a "worse result" from an automated system if it eliminates a lot of physical or psychological harm to people...some content moderation issues probably fall under this case, but not this one.) [1] https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/lure-so-so-technology-and-how-to-avoid-it https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/lure-so-so-tec...

cmehdy 5y ago
As a non-native English speaker I read "so-so automation" like "sus-automation" and found it oddly appropriate.
Spooky23 5y ago
I’d call it “plausible automation”. It enabled things like Facebook to displace message boards for the most part. Look at Facebook or Reddit, they are barely able to police obvious noxious behavior in English, and military juntas in Myanmar are able to organize on the platforms.

jcims 5y ago

It's basically perception and reaction without cognition. In the natural world we would call that instinct. So maybe 'artificial instinct' if we want to keep 'AI' or 'synthetic instinct' because I think it sounds better.

sennight 5y ago
It is basically about using the wrong tool for the job, and continuing to do so even after you (and everyone else) is fully aware of just how wrong you are. Personifying the tool would just distract from the root cause. "I was using a ballpeen hammer to pound in roofing nails, everything was going great until the hammer's 'synthetic instinct' resulted in a painful blow to my groin and a near fatal three story drop. It'll go better next time - I've painted the ballpeen hammer a different color."

sergiotapia 5y ago

Fauxtomation

Barrin92 5y ago

I don't have a word for the phenomenon, but the problem reminds me of a quote by Wilfrid Sellars. "The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term" call it maybe philosophy-lacking, or worldview-lacking, but understanding how things 'hang together' in broad terms is precisely what our 'intelligent' systems cannot do. Agents in the world have an integrated point of view, they're not assemblages of models, and there seems to be very little interest than to build anything but the latter.

TroisM 5y ago

> We need a word or phrase for this phenomenon, where we attempt to substitute human pattern recognition with algorithms that just aren't up to the job. Facebook moderation, Tesla Full Self Driving, the War Games movie, arrests for mistaken facial identification. It's becoming an increasingly dystopic force in our lives and will likely get much worse before getting even worse. So it needs a label. Maybe there's a ten syllable German word that expresses it perfectly? "Fuck the world" is all I can think of in this context

GoOnThenDoTell 5y ago

Sloppy Intelligence

nirui 5y ago

Industrial revolutions has happened few times in the past, and every time it occurs, we change our world to adopt it. I can't help but wonder, what the world would look like if services in the future will be provided primarily by AIs. How do we adopt them? Do we have to invent a "New Speech" just to make AI understand us better so we can live a easier life? "Question: Have you consumed your food today?", "Answer: I have consumed my food today." Or a more subtle example: "Hi! Welcome to ___. What do you want to eat today?", "I want to eat item one, fifty-six, eighty-seven and ninety-one", "Do you want to eat item one, fifty-six, eighty-seven and ninety-one?", "Yes", "Please make a seat. The food will come right away!" (all without making any Hmm or Err noise)

chii 5y ago
> "Hi! Welcome to ___. What do you want to eat today?", "I want to eat item one, fifty-six, eighty-seven and ninety-one", "Do you want to eat item one, fifty-six, eighty-seven and ninety-one?", "Yes", "Please make a seat. The food will come right away!" (all without making any Hmm or Err noise) this already happens today, with human servers. The menu items are numbered, and you tell them the number instead of the name of the dish.
- bob1029 5y ago
  And then in some places they hand you another number - a pooled session identifier - to take to your table. Then you are expected to respond to events broadcast regarding this number if the food fails to reach the destination automatically.
jcims 5y ago
We're going to resurrect the transatlantic accent. I already have started add a hard 'ng' on 'going to' because my phone keeps abbreviating it to 'gonna'.
- guerrilla 5y ago
  Yeah that's probably not goinv to work for India and the rest of the anglosphere.

visarga 5y ago

There's an acronym: OOD - out of distribution - for these situations. There's no reason YT can't detect chess from hate speech if they updated their training set. Maybe they weren't aware of this failure case, or they didn't get to fix it, or by trying to fix it they caused more false negatives. The way they assign cost to a false positive vs a false negative is also related.

ifyoubuildit 5y ago

A-I-opia. Think like myopia or hyperopia.

human 5y ago

We definitely need a term for this so when we are a victim of this, we can easily raise a flag. I have a few ideas: - Bot blunder - Artificial stupidity - Algofail - Machine madness - Neural slip

canadaduane 5y ago
Artificial Stupidity stands out to me. Nice one!

Gibbon1 5y ago

In economics there is Goodhart's law. 'Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

verdverm 5y ago

AI ~ Attempted intelligence

undersuit 5y ago

Have you heard of the "expert beginner"? Maybe something like that. https://daedtech.com/how-developers-stop-learning-rise-of-the-expert-beginner/ https://daedtech.com/how-developers-stop-learning-rise-of-th...

runarberg 5y ago

In a government system a similar problem is called Bureaucracy. It is similar in the sense that the system is very complex, beyond any single persons comprehension, bureaucratic system is unforgiving in its conclusion, and it is the responsibility of the victim to deal with a false positive using the same (or similarly complex) system to attempt correction. However this is different from bureaucracy in the level of automation and statistical inference. A bureaucratic system doesn’t do inference (or at least that is not its main function), and the steps between require human inputs (albeit really automated humans most of the time). I suggest automatacracy which strings together automation and bureaucracy.

dgb23 5y ago
Computer says No!
nicbou 5y ago
Why not algocracy or robocracy?

SquibblesRedux 5y ago

A receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC curve) [1] describes the tradeoff between sensitivity and recall. No matter how sophisticated we think our classifiers are, the confluence of physics and mathematics will always limit the accuracy of our automated systems. It is just a matter of what kinds of errors we are willing to tolerate. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Receiver_operating_characteristic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Receiver_operating_characteris...

mellosouls 5y ago

Not quite the same situation, but "Malgorithms" is used by Private Eye (British satirical/political magazine) to highlight adverts auto-generated inappropriately to accompany articles on news etc websites. Example: https://twitter.com/joshspero/status/562625460732174336 https://twitter.com/joshspero/status/562625460732174336

joelbondurant 5y ago
I love malgorithms having been exposed to the malicious grift of the healthcare industry.
hutzlibu 5y ago
Of all the suggestions, I like the "Malgorithms" the most. It is catchy, easy to read and probably understandable by normal people as well.
- BoxOfRain 5y ago
  Yeah, it's definitely the most sellable one I've seen. I don't like the implication that it's the algorithm that's malicious rather than the person who wrote the algorithm (no algorithm is inherently malevolent or benevolent in my opinion, it's just an algorithm), but I also know this distinction is completely pointless for the vast majority of people and "malgorithm" gets the gist of what people are getting at across very well.
  - saalweachter 5y ago
    While "malevolent"/"malicious" definitely has a "wicked" connotation, you also see it in words like "maladapted" or "malodorous" which are just "bad" without the "wickedness".
    - BoxOfRain 5y ago
      That's still dumping a "bad" on the poor old algorithm though, which has done nothing wrong simply by existing and doing what it is programmed to do. Algorithms aren't bad, it's the programmers who write them and the managers who decide they should be written who are bad when things like this happen.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

noodles_nomore 5y ago

"Cheap AI"/"cheap automation", to dispel the notion that throwing data at a neural network is high science or serious engineering. Or, even more directly, reduce it to "fuzzy matching". AI is just a fuzzy pattern database.

biztos 5y ago

10 might be inelegant, or not... Rechenunmenschtauglichkeitsempfindung! /ex-germanist :-)

howaboutnope 5y ago

> It's becoming an increasingly dystopic force in our lives and will likely get much worse before getting even worse. So it needs a label. It's not just something that happens to us, it's something we do. We need to do better rather than accepting it as inevitable, and let future generations worry about what the best name for it was. > Maybe there's a ten syllable German word that expresses it perfectly? That being said, I propose Urteilsfähigkeitsauslagerungsnekrose: The necrosis that follows the outsourcing of our capability of judgement.

laurent92 5y ago
11 syllables, almost as requested ;) May I suggest “yacht-feet automation”? It focuses on increasing the yacht feet of Zuckerberg, and doesn’t do anything else right?
- burning_hamster 5y ago
  Jachtverlängerungsautomatisierung ;-) Also 11 sylabels.
  - hef19898 5y ago
    Man, German can be such a nice, beautiful language for stuff like that!
- remram 5y ago
  "It's not a feature, it's just another yacht foot". I like it.
Symbiote 5y ago
> Urteilsfähigkeitsauslagerungsnekrose Post-reason-delegation necrosis? But English is always a bit awkward for this sort of thing.

johnsonyuen 5y ago

False positive?

blablablerg 5y ago
This is the term for it, but probably not sexy enough when I read all the other suggestions.

Lutzb 5y ago

Superficial Intelligence.

mellosouls 5y ago

Artificial Due Diligence

notyourday 5y ago

No. What we need is something that is amazingly simple: * you, a programmer who coded something that caused company X to lose Y dollars because of a "mistake", have to be on a hook for Y dollars. * you, a manager who managed a project that caused a company X to lose Y dollars because of a "mistake" by your programmer, have to be on a hook for Y dollars. * you, a product owner who accepted the what the manager of ta project that caused a company X to lose Y dollars because of a "mistake" by your programmer, have to be on a hook for Y dollars. * you, the CEO of the company that had a product owner who accepted the what the manager of ta project that caused a company X to lose Y dollars because of a "mistake" by your programmer, have to be on a hook for Y dollars. Yes, I understand that the cost of a mistake is now higher than the loss suffered by X. That's the incentive to ensure that it does not happen because the wives or husbands or partners of the people who would now have to pay are going to ensure that they do not do take that whose wacky ideas and implement them -- wacky ideas are abstract but the loss of nice housing, nice organic food, nice daycare for the kids and nice scholarship fun is real.

selcuka 5y ago
Start punishing mistakes and you will soon have a hard time finding good people to employ. Only bad (and broke) ones will be available.
- mrguyorama 5y ago
  Funny, we hold civil engineers accountable and there seem to be plenty of capable engineers to do things that need to be done, and we hold bad pilots accountable, and yet the only reason airlines have a pilot shortage is because they refuse to pay more than $20k a year. Developers need to stop being so allergic to accountability. It's kind of pathetic
  - selcuka 5y ago
    I studied mechanical engineering myself, so I hear you. That being said, software development and civil engineering are very different in terms of risk management. There are strict regulations around what you do and if you play by the rules, you have minimum to no risk. Even if dozens of people die under a collapsing building you are not accountable if everything you had done was by the book. Software development, on the other hand, is more like wild west. There are minimal regulations, only best practices. One developer can never know if the end product is free of any errors. Pilots are a completely different story. The OP was talking about "causing company X to lose Y dollars", not human lives.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

smsm42 5y ago

Artificial Stupidity?

8note 5y ago

I think it's just called machine learning. They're all gonna run into awkward edge cases here and there. Tbh, so do people. Somebody whos not familiar with chess or board games could think the same thing

baremetal 5y ago
that makes it okay then? ignorance is strength!

mirkules 5y ago

It's funny that you should mention War Games, because the only way to win this battle is not to play at all. Why are we so hell-bent on restricting speech and burning all these engineering hours trying to moderate something that cannot be moderated? Languages -- and people -- are "transformable" enough to avoid triggering "hate speech" (whatever that actually is, and whoever it is that determines it) algorithms. Let people downvote or shut their computer off if they don't like it, and leave it at that. Are we that scared of words or ideas? I used to live in a communist country (probably the same one that Mr. Radic lives/lived in), where "hate speech" -- which was called anti-state, or anti-establishment speech back then -- was punishable by a middle-of-the-night visit by dark-clad police. Yet, people still found ways to openly criticize the Party, and there were even popular songs that openly defied them, which only demonstrates that not even human pattern recognition is good enough to detect these things, as you state in your first sentence. It's a waste of time, but more importantly it is detrimental to society.

Gibbon1 5y ago
> Why are we so hell-bent on restricting speech and burning all these engineering hours trying to moderate something that cannot be moderated? Because if you allow humans to moderate then those humans start acquiring power. Which is something FAANG companies strive to prevent at all costs.
- mirkules 5y ago
  So instead put power in the hands of giant companies because regular people can’t be bothered to not get hot-and-bothered by reading something they don’t like? What makes these companies so morally pure? The only way this can make sense - especially on HN - is if the people who advocate for company control of regular peoples’ lives work at these companies.
robrenaud 5y ago
I am scared of the masses believing nonsense. What fraction of Americans believe the election was stolen? How many people are still going to refuse to be vaccinated? Indeed, bad ideas are scary. I am scared that my country people will lead another insurrection or allow themselves to be a needlessly vulnerable vector for highly transmissible and dangerous virus. Misinformation spreads like wildfire. The notion that good speech counters bad speech relies on rational, well informed, critical thinking skills that are lacking in a significant portion of the populace. It is fundamentally different that a company wants to exercise its right to free speech in choosing what is said on its platform than for a government to use free speech as a fig leaf cover for dissent. Putting up no fight against misinformation and hate speech is not a winning strategy. Society loses much more from nonsense spreading than it does from having to wait 24 hours for high quality chess content to get remoderated.

wolpoli 5y ago

I would call it an "algorithmic oopsies" for the inevitable non-apology when the situation appears on the front page of a major news outlet.

formerly_proven 5y ago
> Ooopsie woopsie! Our AI made a fucky wucky and locked your account for no reason lol. We pwomise nothing pls go away and die uwu PS: If you make a new account we gonna shadowban iwt immediately lmao, if you have any compwaints please write a letter and addwess it to the hospital you were born in.

hkopp 5y ago

In my opinion this is not just about AI. This is more general. We as humans try to fix social issues with technical measures. All the racists are not going to suddenly become good people if we push them to separate platforms.

zpeti 5y ago
Yes but at least you won’t be labeled as conspiracy spreading platforms by the /very important/ media, and your woke employees won’t walk out and disappear. Oh and the current administration won’t pass legislation restricting your platforms or revoking article 230.
- burnished 5y ago
  sorry, are you railing against freedom of association? because it sounds like you are. if you're an insufferable ass (hypothetically speaking) and no one wants to work for you, and so they do not, thats freedom baby.

alpaca128 5y ago

Context-Free Judgement

mleonhard 5y ago

If a human made the same mistake, we would call them incompetent, careless, and negligent. - incompetent system - incompetent robot - incompesys - incompebot - inept system - inept robot - inepsys - ineptobot - inepobot - bunglebot - hambot - sloppybot - careless system - careless robot - carelessys - carelessbot - neglisys - negligent robot - neglibot I like 'neglibot'. "YouTube neglibotted my video." "This is my new email address. My old one got neglibotted." "The app works for typing in data, but the camera feature is neglibotty." "They spent a lot of effort and turned their neglibot automod into carefulbot. In another year it may be meticubot.

nxpnsv 5y ago
Neglibot is nice. Dumbot works too...
- drran 5y ago
  IMHO, it's a case when a bug in an Artificial Intelligence system produces the Artificial Idiot, so "AIdiot", or "AdIot"
  - nxpnsv 5y ago
    Perhaps Artificial Stupid System, you do the acronym yourself...
- llimos 5y ago
  I love Dumbot. Has a beautiful ring to it. Can definitely see it catching on
  - dylan604 5y ago
    Dumbot works with the Carlin rule of improving the word by putting fucking in the middle: dumfuckingbot
drran 5y ago
Slightly related new word: "copiloting" - copying by AI (copy + looting), e.g. GitHub copiloted opensource code.

Hackbraten 5y ago

Verschlimmbesserautomatisierung. Composite noun of verschlimmbessern [1] and Automatisierung (automation). [1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/verschlimmbessern#German https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/verschlimmbessern#German

oncilogical 5y ago

Crapware.

dan_mctree 5y ago

I figured it would be appropriate to ask an AI to come up with a label. So I prompted GPT-J with: AI has proven to be terrible at moderating human content, we felt we needed a word for these kinds of buggy systems and have chosen: " And GPT-J answered: "LOLPOP" Which seems to capture the spirit of unreliable AIs pretty well

Pinegulf 5y ago

There is such term as 'human error'. Thus suggestions: Machine error; Machine learning error; AI error; AI fail.

oldsecondhand 5y ago

Artificial Stupidity

mleonhard 5y ago

'starbot', from 'star chamber' [0]. "In modern times, legal or administrative bodies with strict, arbitrary rulings, no "due process" rights to those accused, and secretive proceedings are sometimes called "star chambers" as a metaphor." Example uses: "I got starbotted." "Instagram's automod is a starbot." "YouTube is too starbotty for your lectures. Better post with your school account." "We're suing them because their starbot took down our site right after our superbowl ad ran." "Play Store starbotted release 14 so we cut a dupe release 15. How much will it cost to push the ad campaign back 2 weeks?" "We use Gmail and Google Docs but not Google Cloud because of the starbots." "I tried to put Google ads on it, but their starbot rejected the site because it doesn't have enough pages. It's a single-page JavaScript utility." (This is my true story about https://www.cloudping.info https://www.cloudping.info ) "Our site gets a lot of traffic but we don't use Google ads because of the starbot risk. Nobody needs that trouble." "The STAHP Bill (Starbot Tempering by Adding Humans to Process) just passed the Senate! Big Tech is finally getting de-Kafka'ed. About f**ing time." [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Chamber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Chamber

eingaeKaiy8ujie 5y ago

Fascism.

kofko 5y ago

How about calling it a "Buttle" after the movie Brazil from 1985 where a certain Mr. "Buttle" gets arrested and killed instead of a Mr. "Tuttle" due to a fly in a teleprinter.

b0rsuk 5y ago
Nowhere near as popular as the skit with the vikings.

mlang23 5y ago

I use the phrase "K ohne I" since years already. Which basically means "künstlich ohne Intelligenz". We all saw this coming. The topic has been gone over in scifi literature. And still, big tech decided its time to roll it out. "A human would also not be perfect, and we claim this algo is better then the avg. human" is the last thing you hear before discriminating tech is rolled out. And since politics is in the grip of commerce, regulations will not happen early enough. We are fucked. 2040 will be horrible.

rowanG077 5y ago

It's not like humans are generally better then this. I mean look at the Github master branch fiasco. It had a completely different meaning then master with slavery connotations. Yet the outrage was so large Github changed this name. I'd say this is the same behavior of this algorithm. Seeing a word and getting "triggered" and marking it as toxic even though it has a completely different meaning.

remram 5y ago
AFAIK there was no outrage, GitHub started it.

thinkingemote 5y ago

How about "inhuman-ops" ? I think this has the unnatural, unjust and just basic wrongness about using AI to be like humans. "human-ops" is the justification to remove human pattern recognition because it's better for a small group of employees (e.g. "we cant let our expensive staff view flags of distressing pictures or boring chess videos, so we will get an algorithm instead". The tech companies HR say that this is pro mental health as an additional way to justify this change and any unemployment.

cowl 5y ago

It's easy to blame this on imperfect technology but I'm not so sure. Couple of months back when all tech companies started their holier than though publicity campaigns with token actions we faced the same issue. "Blacklist" was banned as term because it was deemed racist. No matter that people understand black and white outside the race issue. So if blacklist is deemed by people , not technology, as racist; thus removing context from the equation, why is AI wrong to assume that "attack the black soldier in C4" is hate speech?

TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
It's why feature extraction/stat bucket AI sucks. Human interactions have a social/cultural context. You can't just recognise $thing, you have to recognise how $thing depends on $context for the correct interpretation. Current AI either ignores context completely or doesn't parse it correctly. It's a rediscovery of the ancient "Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana" problem. If you're out on a date and you say "Let's go back to mine" it implies one thing. If you say it to some friends after an evening out it usually means something completely different. Sometimes it means the same thing - but you need to know a lot about the people involved to be able to infer that accurately. And sometimes humans can't parse these nuances accurately either. AI-by-grep or stat bucket can't handle them at all, because the inferences are contextual and specific to situations and/or individuals. They can't be extracted from just the words themselves. Minsky & co researched some of this in the 70s, and eventually it motivated the semantic web people. But it was too hard a problem for the technology of the time. Now it seems somewhat forgotten.

twic 5y ago

Autobungling?

adminscoffee 5y ago

hashstag

ctrlp 5y ago

"Totalitalgorithms" (Totalgorithms?) captures the spirit of these algorithms. They seem like bugs but they're actually undirected, organic features of a total technocratic political system that is rapidly coming to dominate life in our modern societies. The filters will be tuned but not fixed because they aren't broken. They're part of what Tocqueville described as 'soft despotism': "Thus, After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_despotism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_despotism

washadjeffmad 5y ago
Algorithmic totalitarianism resonates strongly. It's not a human rights violation if it isn't a human doing it!
- dylan604 5y ago
  The human's rights were still violated even if it was a machine that did it.

saint_abroad 5y ago

Deep Neural Indifference - DNNs without emotional weights to guide behaviour and interactions. Leads to impaired empathy and lack of remorse.

voidhorse 5y ago

The suggested “malgorithms” is probably the best noun form for these algorithms themselves. As for terminology that captures society’s general over reliance on automation and algorithms to handle things that really ought to have direct human intervention, I like Rouvroy’s “algorithmic governmentality”

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

whatshisface 5y ago

The same phenomenon happens without computers when bureaucratic rules are applied senselessly.

mohi13 5y ago

The word is “False Positive”

beprogrammed 5y ago

AI: Artificial Ignorance

dominicl 5y ago

AS or just artificial stupidity I've heard a couple of times. It's quite mind boggling if you think about how many people had to engineer tensors and train networks for months if not years to create a system capable of so blatant stupidity.

sebazzz 5y ago

The problem of the flagging isn't so much of an issue, if it weren't for the fear that you don't know whether you can get an actual human being at Google to get in touch with you.