The first time I read Peter’s posting for The Golden Record Curation assignment my immediate response was “cop out!” (sorry Peter). “I realized that no choice would be a bad choice. So the choice I made was to not choose.” By randomly choosing songs Peter just flew in the face of my entire posting; music elicits an emotional response with people and we can harness that and curate pieces together carefully and thus, at the end, have a new exciting, emotionally charged piece of work for others to enjoy: the mixtape. I laboured over my list for quite some time, brought my family in to listen, bored friends at work by asking them if they thought that the songs transitioned easily into each other, and Peter randomly chose ten numbers and BAM! Done.
“It seems like bots are making lots of decisions for us these days. So I decided to be a bot of a kind.”
With these two sentences Peter completely changed my outlook. Bots (or algorithms) do make a lot of decisions about what we see and consume at present. As Dr. Cathy O’Neil said in her article How can we stop algorithms telling lies?:
“…the underlying functionality (of an algorithm) is… : collect historical data about people, profiling their behaviour online, location, or answers to questionnaires, and use that massive dataset to predict their future purchases, voting behaviour, or work ethic.” O’Neil, C. (2017, July 16)
Peter had done nothing but exactly what my Spotify account does after I have finished listening to an album or playlist; look at my historical listening pattern and randomly suggest music that could be deemed similar and likable by me. He had twenty-seven quality pieces to start with and deduced that by using that historical information he would be able to achieve a solid list of songs for the assignment through a random selection process. And he was right; he likes his generated list (and I did too, grudgingly). I believe Peter has given a great example of just how powerful these bots and algorithms are at predicting outcomes by using historical data. We will have to wait and see if individuals will use these tools for the benefit of society or to its detriment.
Peter’s Golden Record Assignment
References
O’Neil, C. (2017, July 16). How can we stop algorithms telling lies? The Observer. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jul/16/how-can-we-stop-algorithms-telling-lies