It turns out that it is relatively simple to make inferences about a person based on their online habits. These companies seem to know everything about just about everyone. A surprising fact is that some of these databases contain records of everything that you’ve ever done from religious affiliations to credit-card usage. Data brokers are companies who buy and collect user data and personal information and then resell it or share it for profit. The section also touches on some very public examples where analytics has played a negative role – Cambridge Analytica’s use of private user data during the 2016 Presidential Elections. This section covers some of the unknown giants in data-science including Peter Thiel’s Palantir. The remainder of my review will speak to some of the book’s many sections and how someone with a business-facing view into the topics sees them. Despite the complexity and depth of the subject matter, Fry is able to bring context and relevance to a broad array of topics. Once you read it, it seems obvious, but trying to describe to a first-year computer science student what an algorithm is can be a challenging task. Hello World: Being Human in the Age of Algorithms (p. My favourite quote from the first part of the book comes on page 8, where Hannah succinctly describes the essence of what an algorithm is in only one sentence:Īn algorithm is simply a series of logical instructions that show, from start to finish, how to accomplish a task. While the author is an expert in the field, she does a great job distilling the topics down to a level understandable by a layperson, but also keeps it interesting for someone with more background in programming and AI. Hannah Fry’s take on the world of AI covers topics ranging from justice to autonomous vehicles, crime, art and even to medicine.
However, most of the advances in modern AI are not the result of revolutionary new concepts or fields of study but rather the application of previously developed algorithms to significantly more powerful hardware and massive datasets. I often think of AI as something separate from traditional computer programming, something transcendent.
0 kommentar(er)
