When the Cat’s Away, the Algorithms Will Play… Havoc

Speaking at one of the TED Talks events in Edinburgh, Kevin Slavin gives us a pretty bleak depiction of how our ways of charting and breaking everything down have spun out of control. He starts and at the end nicely rounds off his speech with a bunch of photos that were digitally manipulated by artist Michael Najjar to reflect the ups and downs, and depths of despair, of the Dow Jones and Hang Seng indexes. Wouldn’t you know it, the financial meltdown features prominently in the photographer’s mountain ranges…

Slavin then eases into his main topic, algorithms, and touches on many aspects of our daily lives that involve these precise (to the millisecond!) calculations – all of which is to show how little we know about the cogs and wheels and inner workings at play in our world nowadays. We’ve managed to render our very existence, in its totality, from economics to cultural phenomena, so complex so as to make it “unreadable,” as he puts it, even to ourselves.

Aside from being the chairman and co-founder of Area/Code, a company involved in coming up with innovative gaming options for mobiles, PCs and whatever platform that can carry them, Slavin now proves himself to be an exceptionally riveting public speaker. He keeps the tech lingo to a minimum (while, of course, bearing in mind the lowest common denominator in his TED audience is surely endowed with an above-average IQ), smoothly moves from one subject matter to another, and peppers his talk with pointedly-marked arguments – while cleverly inserting self-deprecation and callbacks, meat and potatoes of standup shows, for good measure. “We’ll actually part the water to pull money out of the air. Because it’s a bright future… if you’re an algorithm” – dystopia has never sounded quite so funny!