ESCP Europe

Cathy O'neil main point is that predictive models are never neutral but reflect the goals and ideology of those who create them. They also tend to load the dice against poor people, reinforcing inequality in society. From calculating university rankings or credit ratings and processing job applications, to deciding what advertising you see online or what stories appear in your Facebook news feed, algorithms play an increasingly important role in our lives. Even the police use big data to help them predict where crimes may occur. The problem, as ONeil so eloquently demonstrates, is that these algorithms are often incapable of reflecting the real world: mathematical models should be our tools, not our masters.@The Guardian, jul.2015