Hannah Fry

‘One of the best books yet written on data and algorithms. . .deserves a place on the bestseller charts.’ (The Times) You are accused of a crime. Who would you rather determined your fate – a human or an algorithm? An algorithm is more consistent and less prone to error of judgement. Yet a human can look you in the eye before passing sentence. Welcome to the age of the algorithm, the story of a not-too-distant future where machines rule supreme, making important decisions – in healthcare, transport, finance, security, what we watch, where we go even who we send to prison. So how much should we rely on them? What kind of future do we want? Hannah Fry takes us on a tour of the good, the bad and the downright ugly of the algorithms that surround us. In Hello World she lifts the lid on their inner workings, demonstrates their power, exposes their limitations, and examines whether they really are an improvement on the humans they are replacing. A BBC RADIO 4: BOOK OF THE WEEK SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2018 BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE AND 2018 ROYAL SOCIETY SCIENCE BOOK PRIZE

How to be Human in the Age of the Machine

Hello World

Beatričė 

Juk ateitis neatsiranda savaime. Ja kuriame mes.

Jau žinome, kad žmogus puikiai geba suprasti įvairiau- sius niuansus, analizuoti kontekstus, naudotis savo patirtimi ir atpažinti dėsningumus. Bet jam nesiseka sutelkti ir išlaikyti demesio, pasiekti tikslumo, nuoseklumo ir aiškiai suvokti aplinkos. Trumpai tariant, müsų gebéjimai - visiškai priešingi tiems, kurie büdingi algoritmams.

Fabian Beiner

[…] trusting a usually reliable algorithm is one thing. Trusting one without any firm understanding of its quality is quite another.

Everywhere you look — in the judicial system, in healthcare, in policing, even online shopping — there are problems with privacy, bias, error, accountability and transparency that aren't going to go away easily. Just by virtue of some algorithms existing, we face issues of fairness that cut to the core of who we are as humans, what we want our society to look like, and how far we can cope with the impending authority of dispassionate technology.

Please make that a thing and call it “The Fry Test.” 🙏🏻

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 something smells quite a lot like bullshit. 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.

In the age of the algorithm, humans have never been more important.

Hello World quotes

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