Algorithms: What Are They And How Do They Affect You?
What are these things called Algorithms? How do they affect you? They control your news feeds. It is what makes services, like Facebook, decide what to show you based on the things you like. It also gets its basis from people you talk to, news you read, and lots of other data to build your social identity.
The Purpose Of Algorithms
They are not magical things that live in our computers. People implemented them to serve a purpose. They are written in codes and works invisibly. Its implementation is hidden from view, for security purposes. This is done deliberately in some cases to prevent reverse engineering. They can interpret publicly readable-form at lightning-fast speeds largely behind the scenes.
What Is An Algorithm
In order to understand what they are and how they affect our lives and behavior, we must first learn a little bit about them. We make use of algorithms everyday in the software and hardware that we use. They are useful in distributing ads and results in Google, or doing activities in our processors.
They have been in existence for centuries. The Babylonians composed algorithms in clay tablets 4,000 years ago. It is a set of rules that something follows to complete a task. It may be a simple recipe to the more complicated software serving bits of personalized data on the web.
How Algorithms Affect You
They have the power to affect our daily lives. It can be useful to national security via the crime-prediction algorithms. Facebook’s news feed algorithm has the power to affect elections. The use of Facebook is the most high-profile example of how it can affect our lives. Many people use Facebook. What they see on this app affect their daily lives. Little changes affect us.
When Facebook modifies or changes some things, we react right away. Some even freak out. But Facebook has replaced humans in place of algorithms for some functions. Despite of the fact that machines may know all about you, humans still provide some personal touch.
