Words matter. These are the best Hannah Fry Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
If we permit flawed machines to make life-changing decisions on our behalf – by allowing them to pinpoint a murder suspect, to diagnose a condition or take over the wheel of a car – we have to think carefully about what happens when things go wrong.
In medicine, you learn about ethics from day one. In mathematics, it’s a bolt-on at best. It has to be there from day one and at the forefront of your mind in every step you take.
No weather forecaster can tell you for sure when to wear a rain slicker, stock up on canned goods, or evacuate a city that’s in a cyclone’s path. All forecasters can offer is their best guess at the atmosphere of the future, whispered by the simulated blue marble and wrapped up in uncertainty.
What seems obvious to one person wouldn’t occur to another. Your perspective is hard coded into the work that you create.
Because, ultimately, we can’t just think of algorithms in isolation. We have to think of the failings of the people who design them – and the danger to those they are supposedly designed to serve.
Imagine life without any algorithms at all, you wouldn’t be able to do anything. This is already completely encompassing. We have a habit of over-trusting what mathematics or computer scientists tell us to do, without questioning it, too much faith in the magical power of analysis.
I don’t like the algorithms that don’t do what they claim they do.
One of the first things I did when I finished my Ph.D. was work with the police to look at what happened during the London riots in 2011, which took over the city.
There’s actually an awful lot of mathematics that goes into designing a railway, keeping it running, making sure everything runs optimally. Every time you need something to be optimal there’s going to be some mathematics at play.
When you don’t have diversity in the creative process, you inevitably end up with a single, narrow perspective in the output.
And anytime a programmer makes a decision about how to deal with data, how to average it or clean it, you’re imparting more of your own bias on it.
I do think we’re at a point in our history where almost all of the big, grand, challenges faced by the human race are those that demand a scientific solution: climate change; access to clean water; over-crowding; plastic waste.
The Gottman Institute’s study about arguments in long-term relationships concludes that couples with the best chance at long-term success are the ones with a low negativity threshold: if something’s wrong, they speak up about it immediately. That’s something I’ve taken on board.
All around us, algorithms provide a kind of convenient source of authority: an easy way to delegate responsibility, a short cut we take without thinking.
When designing algorithms as a business owner, your incentive is your profit, something for your business, it’s not an incentive to maximise something for the individual.
But for me, true art can’t be created by accident. There are boundaries to the reach of algorithms. Limits to what can be quantified. Among all of the staggeringly impressive, mindboggling things that data and statistics can tell me, how it feels to be human isn’t one of them.
So my favorite online dating website is OkCupid, not least because it was started by a group of mathematicians.
In our urge to automate, in our eagerness to adopt the latest innovations, we appear to have developed a habit of unthinkingly handing over power to machines.
A century ago the Spanish flu confounded scientists and devastated whole regions, but while today’s society has air travel and an enormous, heterogeneous population, we also have antibiotics, fantastic communication networks and, perhaps most crucially, more data than ever.
Because for me, equations and symbols aren’t just a thing. They’re a voice that speaks out about the incredible richness of nature and the startling simplicity in the patterns that twist and turn and warp and evolve all around us, from how the world works to how we behave.
At some point in the future – possibly the very near future – Britain will be hit by a deadly pandemic, and its impact could be utterly devastating.
I spend quite a lot of time thinking about how curated our information is. What we watch, what we read, what we buy, often who we talk to, is all shaped and influenced by some kind of a mathematical algorithm.
We’re living in an age where new technology offers gigantic upsides – artificial intelligence has the potential to diagnose cancer, catch serial killers and reduce prison populations.
You can’t assess the value of an innovation in isolation, you have to consider whose hands it’s in.
The weather doesn’t respect political or geographic boundaries: we’re all living under the same sky. And so weather prediction has been a marvel not only of technology but also of international cooeperation.
But as soon as Facebook decided that they wanted to become purveyors of news, suddenly you have these highly personalized newsfeeds where everything is based on what your friends like, what you like, things that you’ve read in the past.
Technology on its own isn’t good or or evil.
When it comes to love, making long-term decisions is a risky business. Sooner or later, most of us decide to leave our carefree bachelor or bachelorette days behind us and settle down.
We have this imbalance where the people who are making algorithms aren’t talking to the people who are using them. And the people who are using them aren’t talking to the people who are having decisions made about their lives by them.
The best couples, or the most successful couples, are the ones with a really low negativity threshold. These are the couples that don’t let anything go unnoticed and allow each other some room to complain.
