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

by Hannah Fry

Because the future doesn’t just happen. We create it.

algorithm (noun): A step-by-step procedure for solving a problem or accomplishing some end especially by a computer.

By this broad definition, a cake recipe counts as an algorithm. So does a list of directions you might give to a lost stranger. IKEA manuals, YouTube troubleshooting videos, even self-help books – in theory, any self-contained list of instructions for achieving a specific, defined objective could be described as an algorithm.

Although AI has come on in leaps and bounds of late, it is still only ‘intelligent’ in the narrowest sense of the word. It would probably be more useful to think of what we’ve been through as a revolution in computational statistics than a revolution in intelligence.

‘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.

concluded that mathematical algorithms, no matter how simple, will almost always make better predictions than people.

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.

using algorithms as a mirror to reflect the real world isn’t always helpful, especially when the mirror is reflecting a present reality that only exists because of centuries of bias.

Weber’s Law states that the smallest change in a stimulus that can be perceived, the so-called ‘Just Noticeable Difference’, is proportional to the initial stimulus.

Hungarian Ignaz Semmelweis, who in the 1840s noticed something startling in the data on deaths on maternity wards. Women who gave birth in wards staffed by doctors were five times more likely to fall ill to sepsis than those in wards run by midwives. The data also pointed towards the reason why: doctors were dissecting dead bodies and then immediately attending to pregnant women without stopping to wash their hands.

If somebody has a cancer cell in their body, the chances are their immune system will identify it as a mutated cell and just attack it and kill it – that cancer will never grow into something scary. But sometimes the immune system messes up, meaning the body supports the growth of the cancer, allowing it to develop. At that point cancer can kill.

how his latest autonomous vehicles worked, and he explained as follows: ‘It’s many, many millions of lines of code, but I could frame the entire thing as probabilistic inference. All of it.’

Lisanne Bainbridge wrote a seminal essay on the hidden dangers of relying too heavily on automated systems.48 Build a machine to improve human performance, she explained, and it will lead – ironically – to a reduction in human ability.

the harder you look for crime, the more likely you are to find it, then the act of sending police out could actually change the crime records themselves: ‘When police are in a place,’ Davies told me, ‘they detect more crime than they would have done otherwise. Even if an equal value of crime is happening in two places, the police will detect more in the place they were than the one that they weren’t.’

And herein lies a critical point: similarity is in the eye of the beholder. With no strict definition of similarity, you can’t measure how different two faces are and there is no threshold at which we can say that two faces are identical. You can’t define what it means to be a doppelgänger, or say how common a particular face is; nor – crucially – can you state a probability that two images were taken from the same individual.

chapter.) Here’s the problem: the chances of misidentification multiply dramatically with the number of faces in the pile. The more faces the algorithm searches through, the more chance it has of finding two faces that look similar.

Gary Marx, professor of sociology at MIT, put the dilemma well in an interview he gave to the Guardian: ‘The Soviet Union had remarkably little street crime when they were at their worst of their totalitarian, authoritarian controls. But, my God, at what price?’82

William Goldman – the writer behind The Princess Bride and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid – put it more succinctly: ‘Nobody knows anything.’

Even if there are some objective criteria that make one artwork better than another, as long as context plays a role in our aesthetic appreciation of art, it’s not possible to create a tangible measure for aesthetic quality that works for all places in all times.

But an algorithm needs something to go on. So, once you take away popularity and inherent quality, you’re left with the only thing that can be quantified: a metric for similarity to whatever has gone before.