The Invisible Hand in the Algorithm

(Screenshot from Google Deepmind Youtube Channel)

In cities, power rarely announces itself. You can feel it in the way traffic lights favor certain routes, in how park benches are missing in some neighborhoods, or how some areas stay forever under construction while others get beautified every election cycle.

For years, I’ve thought of this as the invisible hand of urban planning, quiet, consistent, shaping lives without debate.

Now, that same invisible hand is moving into the digital space. Algorithms have become our new city planners. They decide who gets seen, who gets heard, and who gets forgotten. The question I keep asking is simple: who plans the algorithm, and who lives in its blind spots?

In the episode “The Ethics of AI Assistants” from Google DeepMind: The Podcast, Iason Gabriel, Senior Staff Research Scientist at Google DeepMind, spoke about a future where “millions or billions of agents” could act on our behalf. He called it “a world quite different from the one we live in now.” When AI systems begin to make choices for us, much like city bureaucracies do, the consequences compound invisibly.

Gabriel also noted that these assistants will be “plugged into different kinds of tools that will allow them to take action in the world.” That is the moment when algorithms stop being reflections and start becoming actors, when a line of code can move resources, shape opportunity, or quietly deny it.

If algorithms are the new governance, then ethics must become the new activism.

Just as citizens once demanded transparency from municipalities, we now need to demand it from models.
Cities and systems both need public scrutiny; otherwise, progress becomes a gated colony.

https://youtu.be/aaZc-as-soA?si=ybTWv_mwdLluuppf