HOW did you decide to read this review? If you were holding the magazine in your hands, the decision was probably yours alone, but online, what you clicked on may have been influenced by curating bots run by the likes of Google and Facebook. In Automate This, journalist Christopher Steiner details how we have ceded decisions about stock trading, music-making, medical diagnoses and more to computer algorithms 鈥� and how they often do a better job than human professionals.
Steiner recounts how the algorithmic takeover began as long ago as the 1970s, when a computer programmer, Thomas Peterffy, wrote software to help him spot money-making trades on the New York Stock Exchange. Peterffy made printed summaries of his algorithm鈥檚 output and consulted them in the hustle and bustle of the trading floor.
After a few teething troubles, Peterffy was scoring deals that left professional traders baffled. Now he is one of the richest people in the world, and algorithms carry out 60 per cent of all stock trades in the US. It is a story repeated in many other walks of life, with algorithms spotting chart-topping musicians who had been overlooked by talent scouts, and AI-based computers like IBM鈥檚 Watson muscling in on medicine with faster diagnoses than any human doctor.
Advertisement
Steiner鈥檚 book is an informative, entertaining and sometimes terrifying look at this new algorithmic world. It鈥檚 so good, in fact, that I wonder if he had a little help from a computer鈥�
Automate This: How algorithms came to rule our world
Portfolio