The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

by Pedro Domingos

As companies grow, they go through three phases. First, they do everything manually: the owners of a mom-and-pop store personally know their customers, and they order, display, and recommend items accordingly. This is nice, but it doesn’t scale. In the second and least happy phase, the company grows large enough that it needs to use computers. In come the programmers, consultants, and database managers, and millions of lines of code get written to automate all the functions of the company that can be automated. Many more people are served, but not as well: decisions are made based on coarse demographic categories, and computer programs are too rigid to match humans’ infinite versatility. After a point, there just aren’t enough programmers and consultants to do all that’s needed, and the company inevitably turns to machine learning. Amazon can’t neatly encode the tastes of all its customers in a computer program, and Facebook doesn’t know how to write a program that will choose the best updates to show to each of its users. Walmart sells millions of products and has billions of choices to make every day; if the programmers at Walmart tried to write a program to make all of them, they would never be done. Instead, what these companies do is turn learning algorithms loose on the mountains of data they’ve accumulated and let them divine what customers want.