Sublime

IBM, for example, managed to fix the problem of poor gender identification that Joy Buolamwini discovered by building a new training set with more pictures of black women. Google solved its gorilla challenge in the opposite way: by removing pictures of gorillas from the training set. Neither solution is general; both are instead hacks, designed to

Yet the really important algorithms – such as the Google search algorithm – are developed by huge teams. Each member understands just one part of the puzzle, and nobody really understands the algorithm as a whole.

some of the very people who are developing search algorithms and architecture are willing to promote sexist and racist attitudes openly at work and beyond, while we are supposed to believe that these same employees are developing “neutral” or “objective” decision-making tools.

The strong implication is that Buterin and his colleagues will have to take a back seat in the AI bandwagon, which represents the climactic technology in the history of human invention. The idea of a new generation of transformational technologists does not fit the plot line of a new eschaton. But Google and its world are looking in the wrong direc

As Peter Norvig, Google’s director of research, puts it: “We don’t have better algorithms. We just have more data.”