This is a celebration of the weirdness of the cosmos, the strangeness of humans and the fact that amid all the mess, we can somehow make In Rutherford and Fry's comprehensive guidebook, they tell the complete story of the universe and absolutely everything in it - skipping over some of the boring parts. In Hello World she lifts the lid on their inner workings, demonstrates their power, exposes their limitations, and examines whether they really are an improvement on the humans they are replacing.Ī BBC RADIO 4: BOOK OF THE WEEKSHORTLISTED FOR THE 2018 BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE AND 2018 ROYAL SOCIETY SCIENCE BOOK PRIZE.

Hannah Fry takes us on a tour of the good, the bad and the downright ugly of the algorithms that surround us.

So how much should we rely on them? What kind of future do we want? You in the eye before passing sentence.Welcome to the age of the algorithm, the story of a not-too-distant future where machines rule supreme, making important decisions - in healthcare, transport, finance, security, what we watch, where we go even who we send to prison. Who would you rather determined your fate - a human or an algorithm?An algorithm is more consistent and less prone to error of judgement. All the same, this book is scarcely 200 pages long, and I would very much have liked to read more of Fry’s insights into the way algorithms work in politics, advertising and social media.Still, Hello World ranks alongside Timandra Harkness’s Big Data and Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction as one of the best books yet written on data and algorithms.'One of the best books yet written on data and serves a place on the bestseller charts.' (The Times)You are accused of a crime. Probably the most annoying thing a critic can do to a writer is to chastise them for leaving things out. Durham constabulary has a piece of artificial intelligence that can calculate the risk that suspects will reoffend. The Kent force uses a package called PredPol, which can forecast where in the county crime is likely and so direct its patrols. Algorithms are already pervasive in policing. The best chapters in Hello World deal with crime and justice. Hannah Fry, a mathematician.has produced is a stylish, thoughtful and scrupulously fair-minded account of what the software that increasingly governs our world can and cannot do.

Hannah fry algorithms