Weapons of Math Destruction: invisible, ubiquitous algorithms are ruining millions of lives

C.P. Snow got it right in 1961. Algorithms control our lives, and those who don’t know what algorithms are don’t know what questions to ask about them.  This is a powerful argument for universal computing education.  I like the below quote for highlighting that a better term for the concern is “model,” not “algorithm.”

Discussions about big data’s role in our society tends to focus on algorithms, but the algorithms for handling giant data sets are all well understood and work well. The real issue isn’t algorithms, it’s models. Models are what you get when you feed data to an algorithm and ask it to make predictions. As O’Neil puts it, “Models are opinions embedded in mathematics.”

Source: Weapons of Math Destruction: invisible, ubiquitous algorithms are ruining millions of lives / Boing Boing