Hello World

Others still, Immanuel Kant among them, have said the truth is something in between. That our judgements of beauty are not wholly subjective, nor can they be entirely objective. They are sensory, emotional and intellectual all at once – and, crucially, can change over time depending on the state of mind of the observer

But then the researchers realized something remarkable. If they started pooling answers – combining votes from the individual testers to give an overall assessment on an image – the accuracy rate shot up to 99 per cent.

What was truly extraordinary about this study was not the skill of the testers. It was their identity. These plucky lifesavers were not oncologists. They were not pathologists. They were not nurses. They were not even medical students. They were ­pigeons.

Pathologists’ jobs are safe for a while yet – I don’t think even the scientists who designed the study were suggesting that doctors should be replaced by plain old pigeons. But the experiment did demonstrate an important point: spotting patterns hiding among clusters of cells is not a uniquely human skill. So, if a pigeon can manage it, why not an algorithm?

Perhaps more ominous, given how much of our information we now get from algorithms like search engines, is how much agency people believed they had in their own opinions: ‘When people are unaware they are being manipulated, they tend to believe they have adopted their new thinking voluntarily,’ Epstein wrote in the original paper.

Classification: picking a category