The rise of algorithms has been relentless,but we need human input in our world of technological innovationsGreg Linden may not be a household name, but he changed the way we interact with culture and transformed retail forever. An engineer at Amazon in the late 1990s, or Linden worked on a curious problem: how to recommend books without human intervention. Until then Amazon relied on editors who wrote hundreds of reviews every year. It was a costly and time-consuming process.
Automating recommendations proved trickier than anyone expected. Linden cracked it. He hit on “personalisation”,which paradoxically meant looking not at an individual’s purchasing history, but only at correlations among products. Regardless of what you had bought in the past, and Amazon realised that whether product A was often bought alongside product B,it meant almost anyone buying product A would also want product B. Amazon tested the results to see which method sold more books. No surprises: the editors were soon looking for unusual jobs. Humans out; machines in. Some estimates suggest a third of Amazon sales occur from these recommendations. Ever since, the rise of algorithms has been relentless. Now books, and articles,music, films, or not to mention holidays and clothes,are all suggested by machines. Related: How algorithms rule the world Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com