Hello World: Being Human in the Age of Algorithms

by Hannah Fry

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.

having a person with the power of veto in a position to review the suggestions of an algorithm before a decision is made is the only sensible way to avoid mistakes.

People are less tolerant of an algorithm’s mistakes than of their own – even if their own mistakes are bigger.

In their analysis, they’d discovered that home cooks were less likely to claim on their home insurance, and were therefore more profitable.

The most significant, he told me, the one that gives you away as a responsible, houseproud person more than any other, was fresh fennel.

In March 2017, for instance, the US Senate voted to eliminate rules that would have prevented data brokers from selling your internet browser history without your explicit consent. Those rules had previously been approved in October 2016 by the Federal Communications Commission; but, after the change in government at the end of that year, they were opposed by the FCC’s new Republican majority and Republicans in Congress.15

openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.

‘The courts are concerned about not making mistakes – especially the judges who are appointed by the public. The algorithm provides them a way to do less work while not being accountable.’35

After a short period of training, the testers were set to work, with impressive results. Working independently, they correctly assessed 85 per cent of samples. 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.

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.7

The algorithm does the donkey-work of searching the enormous amount of information in the slides, highlighting a few key areas of interest. Then the pathologist takes over. It doesn’t matter if the machine is flagging cells that aren’t cancerous; the human expert can quickly check through and eliminate anything that’s normal. This kind of algorithmic pre-screening partnership not only saves a lot of time, it also bumps up the overall accuracy of diagnosis to a stunning 99.5 per cent.18

Ninety per cent of the nuns who went on to develop Alzheimer’s had ‘low linguistic ability’ as young women, while only 13 per cent of the nuns who maintained cognitive ability into old age got a ‘low idea density’ score in their essays.20

That’s a very sensible fear in the UK, where some cash-strapped NHS hospitals are already prioritizing non-smokers for knee and hip operations.49 And there are many countries around the world where insurance or treatment can be denied to obese patients.50

finding the location of a driverless car turns out to be rather similar to a problem that puzzled Thomas Bayes, the British Presbyterian minister and talented mathematician after whom the theorem is named. Back in the mid-1700s, he wrote an essay which included details of a game he’d devised to explain the problem.

It’s the reason why a friend of mine claimed she could barely sit through Christopher Nolan’s beautifully made film Dunkirk – because she struggled to distinguish between the actors.

I’d prefer to defer to Leo Tolstoy. Like him, I think that true art is about human connection; about communicating emotion. As he put it: ‘Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.’23

our reluctance to question the power of an algorithm has opened the door to people who wish to exploit us. Despite the weight of scientific evidence to the contrary, there are people selling algorithms to police forces and governments that claim to ‘predict’ whether someone is a terrorist or a paedophile based on the characteristics of their face alone.

Perhaps the answer is to build algorithms to be contestable from the ground up. Imagine that we designed them to support humans in their decisions, rather than instruct them. To be transparent about why they came to a particular decision, rather than just inform us of the result.

This is the future I’m hoping for. One where the arrogant, dictatorial algorithms that fill many of these pages are a thing of the past. One where we stop seeing machines as objective masters and start treating them as we would any other source of power. By questioning their decisions; scrutinizing their motives; acknowledging our emotions; demanding to know who stands to benefit; holding them accountable for their mistakes; and refusing to become complacent. I think this is the key to a future where the net overall effect of algorithms is a positive force for society. And it’s only right that it’s a job that rests squarely on our shoulders. Because one thing is for sure. In the age of the algorithm, humans have never been more important.

There’s a trick you can use to spot the junk algorithms. I like to call it the Magic Test. Whenever you see a story about an algorithm, see if you can swap out any of the buzzwords, like ‘machine learning’, ‘artificial intelligence’ and ‘neural network’, and swap in the word ‘magic’. Does everything still make grammatical sense? Is any of the meaning lost? If not, I’d be worried that it’s all nonsense.

Heidi Waterhouse, ‘The death of data: retention, rot, and risk’, The Lead Developer, Austin, Texas, 2 March 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXvPChEo9iU.

Marc Santora, ‘City’s annual cost per inmate is $168,000, study finds’, New York Times, 23 Aug. 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/24/nyregion/citys-annual-cost-per-inmate-is-nearly-168000-study-says.html; Harvard University, ‘Harvard at a glance’, https://www.harvard.edu/about-harvard/harvard-glance.