Time was, entire social castes would be dedicated to divining the intentions of the gods. Chicken entrails, the flight of birds, the rolling of thunder—all this and more was used by ancient peoples befuddled by the randomness of life, in an attempt to impose some order on the world, some meaning on their triumphs and their suffering.
We've outgrown all that these days. In the place of arbitrary and distant gods we have arbitrary and distant algorithms: vast lattices of code that no one really understands, whose purpose seems to be to make the entire world more insane and more racist.
