On a recent episode of Recode Decode, Cindy Cohn, the executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Claire Boyle, the managing editor of McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, spoke with Recode’s Kara Swisher about their special team-up issue, “The End of Trust.”
On the new podcast, they discussed the state of privacy, why Facebook’s users are more like “hostages” than customers, and whether Congress will make a move to regulate tech giants when the government reopens. Plus: Why we can’t rely on algorithms to make important decisions for us.
“When you’ve got a system with a bunch of set rules and those rules are not widely interpretable and you’ve got a huge set of data that you can tell whether it’s right or it’s wrong, you can get a machine to automate in ways that seem really miraculous,” Cohn said, referring to advancements in chess-playing artificial intelligence. “But when you get beyond that relatively narrow scope of things where…
