#57: Bytes — The Black Box
Getting Simple
English - December 13, 2021 07:00 - 13 minutes - 12.8 MB - ★★★★★ - 31 ratingsSociety & Culture Education Self-Improvement Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Host Nono Martínez Alonso and Aziz Barbar on how complex machines work, technological polarization, and the growing need to make algorithms understandable.
Nono hosts the Getting Simple podcast, sketches things that call his attention, writes stories about enjoying a slower life, and records live streams and tutorials on creative coding and machine intelligence.
Aziz is an architect and design technologist. He occasionally teaches design courses on computation and the built environment.
Favorite quotes
"Do we have a backup plan? Very few of us know, we're just blindly trusting these black boxes."
"We're going to have to find ways - we as in the people making the algorithms and people who are technical - to explain how these programs are making decisions for them."
Links
Pascaline (Pascal's calculator)
Python (programming language)
C# (programming language)
People mentioned
Chapters
00:00 · Intro
00:22 · What's the machine doing?
01:21 · Visible mechanisms and the Pascaline
02:49 · Obscuring how mechanisms work
05:02 · Open Source Software
06:13 · Computers excel at complex and repetitive tasks
07:07 · Who's making the background algorithms we use daily?
08:51 · What does 'black boxing' mean?
10:03 · Two types of black box
10:37 · Machine learning and explainability
11:33 · Polarization and a growing need to make algorithms understandable
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