Rage Against the Algorithms

This is just one example of how algorithms are becoming ever more important in society, for everything from search engine personalization, discrimination, defamation, and censorship online, to how teachers are evaluated, how markets work, how political campaigns are run, and even how something like immigration is policed. How can we deal with the power that algorithms may exert on us? How can we better understand where they might be wronging us? By collecting hundreds of autocompletions for queries relating to sex and violence I was able to ascertain which terms Google and Bing were blocking or censoring, uncovering mistakes in how these algorithms apply their editorial criteria. You can't see what's going on inside directly, but if you vary the inputs in enough different ways and pay close attention to the outputs, you can start piecing together some likeness for how the algorithm transforms each input into an output.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/AtlanticScienceAndTechnology/~3/TgVXtcfx0Rw/story01.htm