Still from 2001: a Space Odyssey. (MGM/Stanley Kubrick Productions.)

Algorithms cannot interpret or understand but they can mechanize both, package that reduction into ever new generations of digital devices. This genius is in the packaging, Steve Jobs being the first such genius. Because we are already overwhelmed, as Berardi describes, our interpretation and understanding capabilities are at the levels of corrupted or inadequate of both. We are already not up to challenge the speech of robots. Our ways of knowing were in a confounded state before social media, our pre-algorithm knowing fertile ground for a robotic takeover.