A Philosophical Take on "The Algorithm"
Is "The Algorithm" living? Is it alive?
The way our current rhetoric stands, it seems quite possible that "The Algorithm" -- whether that be the one used on TikTok or Youtube or Instagram -- can be seen as sentient beings, if say, our civilization was being analyzed 100 years from now.
I think part of the reason why we attribute the algorithm is because we (as a society, at least among the consumers of content) assign a certain mystic and oracle-like quality to this computer algorithm. We have no clue how it works, and for our daily use, it works well1 enough2, sometimes dropping in delightful videos or shorts into our feed like drops of honey. Through mysticizing "the algorithm," whether that be the search algorithm, the many recommendation algorithms, or the countless other behind the scene algorithms which we cannot see, we confuse the (supposed and probable) intricacy and complexity with humanness.
It is also simple to refer to an algorithm as a living creature -- we all know what those are like -- yet by assigning the algorithm qualities of a living feature (personification, thanks English class), our brains eventually muddle something with human like qualities with something that is human with human like qualities.
And that creates some complications.
For starters, what does it mean to be alive3? And what are the implications for an algorithm to be alive?
Sometimes↩
It can be argued that we (as humans) are lowering our expectations for these algorithms -- for example, was that really the "perfect" video to watch? Sure, perfect doesn't exist, but in the absence of better, we simply settle for what's there. Philosophically, we've given up -- we've let the algorithm dictate what we watch despite pretending that we watch what we want (also this is true to some extent if you do more than scrolling - searching, finding, etc.)↩
If I uploaded "your mind" to "the cloud" and somehow simulated you, would you be alive? If I cloned you and killed the "original" you, would you be alive?↩