ALGORITHMS, the Makets and Movies

I love movies.  But lately I find it very hard to find a movie I enjoy.  I have wondered who is writing this stuff?  I search through my full cable line-up of channels and think to myself who is selecting our movie viewing?  Then I came across a very informative article on BBC News that made sense to me.  It is called When Algorithms Control The World.  This is an excellent read: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14306146

In brief the article states that algorithms are codes that are created and then set-out on their own, without supervision and is reaching further into our lives then we know and then they can control.  It is reported by the BBC that algorithms are predicting what movies to make or not.  It is even predicting which stars to place in the movies.  I thought of this as I tried to watch the newly released movie THE BEAVER.  Now I thought the plot sounded ridiculous but with Mel Gibson and Jodie Foster I thought I would give it a try anyway.  I must admit I couldn't watch the whole thing so it is possible (though hard to fathom) that the movie pulled out at the end.  The movie was a complete insult to anyone with any kind of intelligence whatsoever.  It was beyond belief.  Only a non-person could decide to make this movie.  Imagine this: Mel Gibson passing out cards to family and co-workers that they shouldn't talk to him directly but only to the BEAVER  puppet on his hand.  I can't say anymore.

Another incident concerning algorithms occurred on Bloomberg right after the 5.9 earthquake hit the East Coast.  Matt Miller reported that copy is sent to the computers of what they are saying (in code of course) that human eyes can't see.  He said when the computers (which control 70% of market trades) read earthquake that the market dropped significantly and then came back shortly with steep gains.

Back to the BBC article that concluded with the idea that maybe we are giving too much  uncontrollable power to algorithms.  Wakefield suggests that maybe we should figure out exactly how much these algorithms know and try to tame them before it is too late.