Of all the buzzy 21st-century tech phrases, “machine learning” threatens to be the most important. Programming computers is slow, but we’re nearing the point where humans give the bots parameters and let them teach themselves. After all, computers can run tons of simulations and figure out the instructions we would have given them if we knew enough. Thus, we don’t try to define a sheep for image-recognition software (that would be hard!), we give the computer a bunch of sheep pictures and let it figure out the most efficient way to define the commonality. It sounds easy enough, except sometimes machines learn the wrong lessons.

AI, capitalism