Tag: whistleblower

  • The terrifying, hidden reality of Ridiculously Complicated Algorithms

    Leseempfehlung: Ein Journalist spricht mit einem anonymen Big Data Engineer/Analyst über die Komplexität von Algorithmen. Wie erschreckend die Abhängigkeit von undurchschaubaren Komponenten geworden ist gegenüber dem Einfluss den Maschinen damit auf unser Leben haben.

    Man kann das auch als Laie verstehen, wie ich meine, selbst mein Verständnis von Big Data reicht nur so weit als das als realistisch einzuschätzen.

    ‘I’ll lose my job if anyone knows about this.”There was a long silence which I didn’t dare to break. I had begged to make this meeting happen. And now the person I had long been trying to meet leaned towards me. “Someone is going to go through your book line by line,” he said, “to try to work out who I am.”He’d been a talented researcher, an academic, until his friend started a small technology company. He had joined the company and helped it to grow. It eventually became so big that the company had been acquired by one of the tech giants. And so, then, was he.He was now paid a fortune to help design the algorithms that were central to what the tech giant did. And he had signed solemn legal documents prohibiting him from speaking to me, or to anyone, about his work. But as the…

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