Hello World: Being Human in the Age of Algorithms

by Hannah Fry

All around us, algorithms provide a kind of convenient source of authority. An easy way to delegate responsibility; a short cut that we take without thinking. Who is really going to click through to the second page of Google every time and think critically about every result? Or go to every airline to check if Skyscanner is listing the cheapest deals? Or get out a ruler and a road map to confirm that their GPS is offering the shortest route? Not me, that’s for sure. But there’s a distinction that needs making here. Because trusting a usually reliable algorithm is one thing. Trusting one without any firm understanding of its quality is quite another.

If you’ve ever convinced yourself that an extremely expensive item of clothing was good value just because it was 50 per cent off (as I regularly do), then you’ll know all about the so-called anchoring effect. We find it difficult to put numerical values on things, and are much more comfortable making comparisons between values than just coming up with a single value out of the blue. Marketers have been using the anchoring effect for years, not only to influence how highly we value certain items, but also to control the quantities of items we buy. Like those signs in supermarkets that say ‘Limit of 12 cans of soup per customer’. They aren’t designed to ward off soup fiends from buying up all the stock, as you might think. They exist to subtly manipulate your perception of how many cans of soup you need. The brain anchors with the number 12 and adjusts downwards. One study back in the 1990s showed that precisely such a sign could increase the average sale per customer from 3.3 tins of soup to 7.52 By now, you won’t be surprised to learn that judges are also susceptible to the anchoring effect. They’re more likely to award higher damages if the prosecution demands a high amount,53 and hand down a longer sentence if the prosecutor requests a harsher punishment.54 One study even showed that you could significantly influence the length of a sentence in a hypothetical case by having a journalist call the judge during a recess and subtly drop a suggested sentence into the convers...

Driverless technology is categorized using six different levels: from level 0 – no automation whatsoever – up to to level 5 – the fully autonomous fantasy. In between, they range from cruise control (level 2) to geo-fenced autonomous vehicles (level 4) and are colloquially referred to as level 1: feet off; level 2: hands off; level 3: eyes off; level 4: brain off.

Although the path to the top wasn’t set in stone, the researchers found that visitors were much more likely to download tracks they knew were liked by others. If a middling song got to the top of the charts early on by chance, its popularity could snowball. More downloads led to more downloads. Perceived popularity became real popularity, so that eventual success was just randomness magnified over time. There was a reason for these results. It’s a phenomenon known to psychologists as social proof. Whenever we haven’t got enough information to make decisions for ourselves, we have a habit of copying the behaviour of those around us. It’s why theatres sometimes secretly plant people in the audience to clap and cheer at the right times. As soon as we hear others clapping, we’re more likely to join in. When it comes to choosing music, it’s not that we necessarily have a preference for listening to the same songs as others, but that popularity is a quick way to insure yourself against disappointment. ‘People are faced with too many options,’ Salganik told LiveScience at the time. ‘Since you can’t listen to all of them, a natural short cut is to listen to what other people are listening to.’

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. Because I’m afraid – long into the foreseeable future – we’re not going to ‘solve world hunger with magic’ or ‘use magic to write the perfect screenplay’ any more than we are with AI.