Outnumbered
From Facebook and Google to Fake News and Filter-bubbles – The Algorithms That Control Our Lives
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
'Fascinating' - Financial Times
Algorithms are running our society, and as the Cambridge Analytica story has revealed, we don't really know what they are up to.
Our increasing reliance on technology and the internet has opened a window for mathematicians and data researchers to gaze through into our lives. Using the data they are constantly collecting about where we travel, where we shop, what we buy and what interests us, they can begin to predict our daily habits. But how reliable is this data? Without understanding what mathematics can and can't do, it is impossible to get a handle on how it is changing our lives.
In this book, David Sumpter takes an algorithm-strewn journey to the dark side of mathematics. He investigates the equations that analyse us, influence us and will (maybe) become like us, answering questions such as:
- Who are Cambridge Analytica? And what are they doing with our data?
- How does Facebook build a 100-dimensional picture of your personality?
- Are Google algorithms racist and sexist?
- Why do election predictions fail so drastically?
- Are algorithms that are designed to find criminals making terrible mistakes?
- What does the future hold as we relinquish our decision-making to machines?
Featuring interviews with those working at the cutting edge of algorithm research, including Alex Kogan from the Cambridge Analytica story, along with a healthy dose of mathematical self-experiment, Outnumbered explains how mathematics and statistics work in the real world, and what we should and shouldn't worry about.
A lot of people feel outnumbered by algorithms – don't be one of them.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
At a time of widespread concern about technology exerting too much influence over people's lives, mathematics professor Sumpter (Soccermatics) devotes this enlightening book to investigating these fears and explaining clearly what algorithms do. He tackles different examples of their appearance in daily life, starting with in-the-news attempts to use the internet to study and influence voters. He discusses data harvested from Facebook users regarding their preferences in politics and other areas (theoretically, Democrats "could focus on getting the vote out among Harry Potter fans"), observing that, thankfully, the data's accuracy is limited by the algorithim designers' own inherent biases. As to the fake news disseminated on Facebook and other content aggregators, Sumpter believes that, for most people, it has little real impact. A more worrying phenomenon, he believes, is how advertising algorithms lead consumers. By reading, buying, or watching what is suggested to them, readers miss out on things that don't fit into the math, since "when we are shown too much information, our brains decide that the best thing to do is just ignore it." In his clear account of how algorithms work, Sumpter provides comfort to those who fear them as an insidious form of mind control, concluding that the real work is to address human biases.
