Hannah Fry

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A look inside the algorithms that are shaping our lives and the dilemmas they bring with them.
If you were accused of a crime, who would you rather decide your sentence—a mathematically consistent algorithm incapable of empathy or a compassionate human judge prone to bias and error? What if you want to buy a driverless car and must choose between one programmed to save as many lives as possible and another that prioritizes the lives of its own passengers? And would you agree to share your family's full medical history if you were told that it would help researchers find a cure for cancer?
These are just some of the dilemmas that we are beginning to face as we approach the age of the algorithm, when it feels as if the machines reign supreme. Already, these lines of code are telling us what to watch, where to go, whom to date, and even whom to send to jail. But as we rely on algorithms to automate big, important decisions—in crime, justice, healthcare,…
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311 printed pages
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Quotes

  • kinokitohas quoted3 years ago
    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
  • kinokitohas quoted3 years ago
    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?

    I am impressed..

  • kinokitohas quoted3 years ago
    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.

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