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Being able to shrug and say “the algorithm did it,” is almost certainly seen as a killer feature for any authoritarian, soulless megacorp and others. Instead of having to take responsibility for decisions, they just point at the box they programmed to act a certain way, and blame it. Unless a lot more people understand GIGO, this is going to stick around.



Exactly, this is easily one of the scariest things to see happening. Examples like Google's recommendation algorithm pushing people towards more and more extreme content (or even bot created content) signals to me that we're headed down a very dark road.


Right now the big guys can put the blame on their underlings but blaming it on machines will be even better.




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