Sunday, July 07, 2019

Information Literacy and Centaurs

The Rise Of 'Fake News' Coincides With Society Outsourcing Its Thinking To Algorithms - Kalev Leetaru, Forbes

"We are outsourcing our thinking to algorithms designed to moderate, monetize, manipulate and mine us."

I had a one-sided conversation with a friend today (it was via email, so there's no response yet) regarding an aspect of this topic.  I was reading a chapter related to crowd sourced decision making, how to increase the accuracy of those decisions on an individual level, and what it means for human plus computer interaction and prediction.  Along the lines of what's referred to as a centaur.  It's my contention that computers as the driver of prediction with human-curated assessment and, more likely, human-based randomization and error insertion, like the the seed in a game, may require the youngest generation to come of age.  E.g. a generation that can get past feeling that computers serve humans and the internet is human centric, despite a very obvious tendency to give in to letting computers make the decisions with very little information literacy applied.  The internet is too new to most of us (still), and machine learning and AI even moreso, for a sizable segment to be able to critically assess what's being presented and how to counteract bad information, or to even think about those issues to the extent that we do anything other than accept what an algorithm tells us as fact.  To the extent that we have blatant echo chambers where contrary information is readily at hand.

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