Hello World: How to be Human in the Age of the Machine

by Hannah Fry

would vote for, participants were a staggering 12 per cent more likely to pick the candidate Kadoodle had favoured. In an interview with Science in 2015,19 Epstein

It’s like the saying among airline pilots that the best flying team has three components: a pilot, a computer and a dog. The computer is there to fly the plane, the pilot is there to feed the dog. And the dog is there to bite the human if it tries to touch the computer.

algorithm aversion. People are less tolerant of an algorithm’s mistakes than of

their own – even if their own mistakes are bigger.

Palantir is just one example of a new breed of companies known as data brokers, who buy and collect people’s personal information and then resell it or share it for profit. There are plenty of others: Acxiom, Corelogic, Datalogix, eBureau – a swathe of huge companies you’ve probably never directly interacted with, that are none the less continually monitoring and analysing your behaviour.

If data is the new gold, then we’ve been living in the Wild West.

You can imagine a neural network as an enormous mathematical structure that features a great many knobs and dials.