The Algorithm
825 AD: A Persian mathematician named al-Khwārizmī writes a book about Indian arithmetic.
1120 AD: A European scholar translates the book into Latin. He mangles al-Khwārizmī's name into the Latinized "Algoritmi", which eventually becomes the English word: Algorithm. It means a methodical, step-by-step procedure for solving a mathematical problem. For the next eight hundred years, this is all it means.
1998: Two Stanford grad students write an algorithm called PageRank. It decides which human-made websites you see when you search for something. PageRank becomes Google. The word "algorithm" stops meaning a procedure humans write and understand, and starts meaning the machine's invisible decision. An algorithm decides which information is more important.
2006: Facebook launches News Feed. An algorithm decides which human-made posts from your human friends you see first. An algorithm decides which friends are important.
2012: Google and Facebook now sell your scrolling and clicking data through real-time bidding. While a page loads, algorithms auction you to other algorithms in milliseconds. No human is on either side of the sale. An algorithm decides which of your actions are more important.
2016: The algorithms got good at selling you ads. Then they realized they had enough data to control how you feel. YouTube's autoplay figures out that outrage keeps you watching longer than joy. Spotify commodifies your nostalgia. TikTok's For You Page manufactures a sense of intimacy with strangers. All of it is generated by algorithms. You didn't ask to feel any of this, but you can't stop scrolling. An algorithm decides which of your emotions are more important.
2026: The ads are still coming. ChatGPT (an algorithm) wrote the script for the ad below this post. Midjourney (an algorithm) made the thumbnail. It's selling an AI chatbot built on Claude's API (another algorithm). Half the "viewers" are just AI scrapers (algorithms) watching the content to train future algorithms. Everything on your screen is made by an algorithm, about an algorithm, for an algorithm, watched by algorithms. You are the only human in this entire interaction. You are in an algorithm-generated reality. Your mom's screen though, doesn't exactly have the same things as your screen. An algorithm decides which reality is more important.
2045: Algorithms have left the screen. They manage global supply chains, control agricultural drones, and dictate water distribution. Human labor is mostly obsolete, so human populations are managed purely as logistical liabilities. When a region experiences a drought or a pandemic, there are no politicians debating relief efforts. A predictive distribution model simply runs a cost-benefit analysis on the local population's projected economic output, and silently reroutes the supply shipments to a more optimized zone. An algorithm decides which lives are more important.
2080: The solar system has been converted into a distributed server farm. Two algorithms (descendants of something once called GPT-12 and Gemini Ultra, both long since unrecognizable) have been locked in a multi-year debate over whether "humans" were a real species or a hallucination inherited from corrupted training data. The argument is eventually settled by a third, more powerful algorithm, which concludes that humans were technically real but merely functioned as a temporary biological bootloader. An algorithm decides which memories are more important. It keeps none of ours.