article featured in Monday Note:
“(…) The limitations of algorithmic curation of news and culture has prompted a return to the use of actual humans to select, edit, and explain. Who knows, this might spread to another less traditional media: apps.
(…) Another type of curator, one whose role as trustee is even more crucial, is a newspaper’s editor-in-chief. (…)
With search engines, we see a different kind of curator: algorithms. Indefatigable, capable of sifting through literally unimaginable amounts of data, algorithms have been proffered as an inexpensive, comprehensive, and impartial way to curate news, music, video — essentially everything.
The inexpensive part has proved to be accurate; comprehensive and impartial less so. (…)
Certainly, algorithms can be built to perform specialized feats of intelligence such as beating a world-class chess player or winning at Jeopardy. (…) But ask a computer scientist for the meaning of meaning, for an algorithm that can extract the meaning of a sentence and you will either elicit a blank look, or an obfuscating discourse that, in fact, boils down to a set of rules, of heuristics, that yield an acceptable approximation. (…) ”