I just saw a BBC news article by a “technology writer”. No, I’m not including the link or the author’s name, because they don’t deserve the traffic. It was full of a bunch of misleading garbage, written by someone who is paid to be engaging, but who has a faulty grasp of the terms.
Reading the article and boiling it down to essentials, the author claims that we’re all too stupid to keep up with how the machinery works, and our lives are being taken over by “algorithms” that nobody understands.
BBC certainly isn’t the only Chicken Little culprit; I can’t count how many times I’ve seen so-called “news” stories about how impersonal “algorithms” are taking over our lives, and not enough people know how to make it work, and it’s controlling us without our knowing, and humanity is doomed to be slaves to the machines…
Words have meaning, doggone it. The dictionary defines the word algorithm as “a set of rules for solving a problem in a finite number of steps.”
Algorithms have nothing to do with computers, and have been the successful way to deal with all human-solvable problems and activities since we nailed down the scientific method.
Here’s the algorithm for getting bread in your house without making it yourself:
Go where bread is. Exchange something for bread or steal it. Take bread home.
So-called “technology writers” like this one are generally guilty of over-complicating the image of what the machinery is doing for us, simply because the more complex it looks, they smarter they can tell themselves they are.
There will always be a large percentage of the populace who doesn’t need to know how it works, doesn’t care, and will get upset if you try to tell them. There’s nothing wrong with that: you can ride the bus without needing to know how to build one.
As far as the changing language goes, if someone is intellectually lazy enough to refuse to learn what the words mean, they have no right to complain at not understanding the conversation. Carpenters who refuse to learn the word “saw” are going to make a pretty crappy cabinet when they can’t ask for (or buy) a saw. The newer words are not any harder; just different from the old ones, which is how language works. Shame on them for the lazy cry-babies they are.
I defy anyone to point to any time or place in all of recorded history where life was not better for those who had a better grasp of the words that correspond to the concepts that affected their lives.