{"id":4026,"date":"2020-09-28T20:30:25","date_gmt":"2020-09-28T07:30:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/?p=4026"},"modified":"2020-11-10T20:33:47","modified_gmt":"2020-11-10T07:33:47","slug":"hello-world-hannah-fry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/2020\/09\/28\/hello-world-hannah-fry\/","title":{"rendered":"Hello World — Hannah Fry"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\u201cAlgorithms\u201d will save the world, or possibly destroy it. This book is a good survey of how computerised algorithms are used and misused, and how they can be harnessed so their power can be used for good rather than evil.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are descriptions and analyses of all kinds of algorithms, from potentially useful ones like self-driving algorithms for cars, to controversial ones like profiling algorithms to detect potential criminals. Of course the self-driving car topic leads inevitably to a discussion of the trolley problem<\/a>. Should a car kill its occupant if doing so would save 5 pedestrians? But who would want to travel in such a car?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Currently many algorithms are criticised for being racist or sexist or some other ist. This book has a good discussion of how this can be the unavoidable result of the underlying statistics. For example, a murderer-discrimination algorithm would almost certainly find far more male false positives than female, simply because most murderers are in fact male. So the algorithm just preserves the existing real-world bias. This can be partially offset by tweaking the algorithms — a sort of affirmative action — but the challenge then is to not just make things worse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I enjoyed this book. It covers a lot of ground in this subject which is becoming more newsworthy every day.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cAlgorithms\u201d will save the world, or possibly destroy it. This book is a good survey of how computerised algorithms are used and misused, and how they can be harnessed so their power can be used for good rather than evil. … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4006,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[4,195,16,62],"class_list":["post-4026","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-review","tag-books","tag-hannah-fry","tag-science","tag-society"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4026","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4026"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4026\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4027,"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4026\/revisions\/4027"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4006"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4026"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4026"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4026"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}