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A review by iris_parsons
Hello World: Being Human in the Age of Algorithms by Hannah Fry
4.25
I read this book - Hello World: How to be Human in the Age of the Machine by Hannah Fry - from 16th to 18th February 2024. The book focused on the role of algorithms in everyday life, which many people may not be aware of.
The first chapter focused on power - mainly on the basics of algorithms to support the rest of the book. It explained the story of Stanislav Petrov, a man who was from the Soviet Union who got and alert that the USA had released four nuclear missiles, and decided not to respond to it because it seemed a bit suspicious. This story is important when talking about algorithms, as an algorithm may not have had the caution that Petrov had, which ended up preventing a nuclear war. Key quote: "People are less tolerant of an algorithm's mistakes than their own - even if their own mistakes are bigger" - this is an idea that continues to be explored throughout the book.
In the second chapter, data was explored, and how connected data can be sold to data brokers - countries have started to bring in laws to protect people from this, like ensuring anonymity, but often people's names are in web addresses, so there are ways around this. Additionally, it talked about the story of the Tesco clubcard - Tesco now had information about their customers, which they could use to their advantage, eventually helping them to win a battle in the market against their key competitor, Sainsbury's, but also did things like unveiling a teen pregnancy to a father.
Justice was explored in the next chapter, talking about the bias of algorithms, but also how it is difficult to completely eliminate this, due to biases in data itself. Justice is one of the areas where people are particularly touchy about algorithms, because freedom is important, even though algorithms are much more consistent than humans, who struggle to form the same verdict on the same case multiple times.
The next chapter was about medicine - if you give algorithms access to people's medical data, it could be released, which would be a massive breach of privacy, but could also massively improve public health as an algorithm would be significantly better at noticing patterns. This also talked about the links between humans and algorithms - algorithms can point out problems, while humans properly identify them.
Next was a chapter about cars and the future of driverless cars - the generic topic this explored was how having things automated leads to a lack of skill in humans, which can become fatal in the moments they need to take over.
Geoprofiling (logging places e.g. where crimes were committed geographically) can be used in crime, which I thought was interesting - yet again, this was illustrating how well algorithms can recognise patterns.
Finally, there was a chapter about art, and how that is extremely difficult for computers to make because it is essentially a lucky dip on what is decided as "good quality" and what becomes "popular", meaning that algorithms can't have a set of rules to follow.
The first chapter focused on power - mainly on the basics of algorithms to support the rest of the book. It explained the story of Stanislav Petrov, a man who was from the Soviet Union who got and alert that the USA had released four nuclear missiles, and decided not to respond to it because it seemed a bit suspicious. This story is important when talking about algorithms, as an algorithm may not have had the caution that Petrov had, which ended up preventing a nuclear war. Key quote: "People are less tolerant of an algorithm's mistakes than their own - even if their own mistakes are bigger" - this is an idea that continues to be explored throughout the book.
In the second chapter, data was explored, and how connected data can be sold to data brokers - countries have started to bring in laws to protect people from this, like ensuring anonymity, but often people's names are in web addresses, so there are ways around this. Additionally, it talked about the story of the Tesco clubcard - Tesco now had information about their customers, which they could use to their advantage, eventually helping them to win a battle in the market against their key competitor, Sainsbury's, but also did things like unveiling a teen pregnancy to a father.
Justice was explored in the next chapter, talking about the bias of algorithms, but also how it is difficult to completely eliminate this, due to biases in data itself. Justice is one of the areas where people are particularly touchy about algorithms, because freedom is important, even though algorithms are much more consistent than humans, who struggle to form the same verdict on the same case multiple times.
The next chapter was about medicine - if you give algorithms access to people's medical data, it could be released, which would be a massive breach of privacy, but could also massively improve public health as an algorithm would be significantly better at noticing patterns. This also talked about the links between humans and algorithms - algorithms can point out problems, while humans properly identify them.
Next was a chapter about cars and the future of driverless cars - the generic topic this explored was how having things automated leads to a lack of skill in humans, which can become fatal in the moments they need to take over.
Geoprofiling (logging places e.g. where crimes were committed geographically) can be used in crime, which I thought was interesting - yet again, this was illustrating how well algorithms can recognise patterns.
Finally, there was a chapter about art, and how that is extremely difficult for computers to make because it is essentially a lucky dip on what is decided as "good quality" and what becomes "popular", meaning that algorithms can't have a set of rules to follow.