Beyond Human Understanding

Example of complexity analysis on an algorithm

From the Dawn of Man human beings have worshipped phenomena--e.g., volcanos, hurricanes, the sun, moon, and stars--beyond their understanding.

Now mankind's own creations are on the verge of joining the ranks of the incomprehensible. Algorithms--step-by-step instructions that computers use to perform tasks--have become so complex that they defy analysis by the most expert programmers. In other words "God is in the Machine". According to an anonymous algorithm-builder in a very large, well-known company [bold added]

Within his tech giant, algorithms rarely stand alone. Instead, they exist within webs. “I rely”, he said, “on signals that are produced by other algorithms.” His algorithm was fed by outputs that were shaped by other algorithms. It was like a car assembly line. He, like his colleagues, worked on a small, specific part of a much larger process.

The algorithm was also constantly changing. The data inputs were flowing into the algorithm in real time, but the actual weights, measures and trade-offs that the algorithm made weren’t static either. Some of the functions that the researcher had woven in used machine learning – techniques where the machine constantly learned and adapted to what the most important patterns, correlations and relationships were. It meant that the algorithm was constantly changing and moving as the world moved around it, and its diet of data changed to reflect that.

We sat there, looking at the computer, his creation laid out in multi-coloured type. “This is all to do with complexity,” he said contemplatively. “Complexity of input. Complexity of analysis. Complexity of how outputs are combined, structured and used.” One of the reasons that he’d been employed to build a process like this was exactly because it could handle complexity by being complex itself. It grasped the blinding number of factors, signals and influences that bounced off each other at every moment in ways that we simply cannot.

Algorithms have changed, from Really Simple to Ridiculously Complicated. They are capable of accomplishing tasks and tackling problems that they’ve never been able to do before. They are able, really, to handle an unfathomably complex world better than a human can. But exactly because they can, the way they work has become unfathomable too. Inputs loop from one algorithm to the next; data presses through more instructions, more code. The complexity, dynamism, the sheer not-understandability of the algorithm means that there is a middle part – between input and output – where it is possible that no one knows exactly what they’re doing. The algorithm learns whatever it learns. “The reality is, professionally, I only look under the hood when it goes wrong. And it can be physically impossible to understand what has actually happened.”

We can still pull the plug but won't because we can't give up the benefits of the brave new world that has been built. Just pray that the God we are creating will be merciful.