YouSaid · the spoken record

Hannah Fry

lines on the record: 55
first: 2020-07-07
most recent: 2020-07-07
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Exactly, exactly. Now, of course, the language that you use is really important as well, right? So you can't just be like you, you know, can't just launch it. But I think I love those stories. I love those stories where there's something about humans that is just written completely in the numbers. I think that's really wonderful.”
2020-07-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #87 Hannah Fry: The Role of Algorithms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's left on the floor or something, and it just being totally at odds with what the incident itself is, you know, bottling things up and then exploding.”
2020-07-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #87 Hannah Fry: The Role of Algorithms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Single little thing, and you're kind of compromising, right? That would have been my guess. Turns out though, when you actually look in the data, the exact opposite is true. So the chances, the people who have the best chance at long-term success are actually the people who've got really low negativity thresholds. So these instead, they're the people where if something annoys them, they speak up about it really quickly, immediately essentially, and address that situation right there and then, but they do it in a way where the problem is dealt with and then actually you go back to being, you know, go back to normality. So it's couples where you're continually repairing and resolving very, very tiny issues in your relationship. Because otherwise, you risk bottling things up and then not saying anything and then one day coming home being totally angry about attack.”
2020-07-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #87 Hannah Fry: The Role of Algorithms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Over time. So, the really nice thing about this is that John Gottman then teamed up with the mathematician called James Murray, who came up with a set of equations for how these arguments ebb and flow, the dynamics of these equations essentially. And hidden inside those equations, there's something called the negativity threshold. So essentially, this is how annoying someone has to be before they provoke an extreme response in their partner. So my guess would have been, I mean, they've got the data on, you know, hundreds if not thousands of couples here. My guess always would have been, all right, negativity threshold, surely the people who've got the best chance at long-term success, the people who end up staying together, surely those are going to be the ones where they've got a really high negativity threshold, that would have always been my guess. The couples where you're leaving room for the other person to be themselves, you're not sort of picking on anything on everything.”
2020-07-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #87 Hannah Fry: The Role of Algorithms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, this is my favourite one. So, this is some work that was done by the psychologist John Gottman. He's done some amazing work with couples in long-term relationships. And he's worked out a way that what he essentially does is he gets couples in a room together and he videotapes them and he gets them to effectively to have an argument with one another, right? So officially they say that they ask them to have a conversation about the most contentious issue in their relationship. But basically they lock up a couple in a room and make them have an argument. But what they've done is they worked out a way to score everything that happens during that conversation. So every time that someone's positive, they get a positive score. Every time someone sort of laughs and gives way to the partner and, you know, but even gestures, right? So if you roll your eyes, you get a negative score. If you stonewall your partner, you get a negative negative score, that kind of thing. Anyway, the thing that's kind of neat about this is that it then means that you can look at a graph of how an argument evolves.”
2020-07-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #87 Hannah Fry: The Role of Algorithms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is better than everyone you've seen before. So, yeah, that's what the math says. But I should tell you, right? I should tell you that there's quite a lot of risks involved in this.”
2020-07-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #87 Hannah Fry: The Role of Algorithms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Moment that you're with your perfect partner, so it's essentially a problem in optimal stopping theory it's called. So the rules are that once you reject someone, you can't go back and say actually I wanted you after all because people don't tend to like that. And the other rule is that once you decide that you've settled down, you can't look ahead to see who you could have had going on later in life. So if you frame it like that with those assumptions, then it turns out that the mathematically best strategy is if you spend the first 37% of your dating life just having a nice time and playing the field. So it's 1 over e, right? So there's 7%. Yeah, spend the first 7% of your life just playing field, having a nice time, getting to know people, but not taking anything too seriously. And then after that period has passed, you then settle down with the next person who comes along.”
2020-07-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #87 Hannah Fry: The Role of Algorithms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is the one that got me the most in trouble. So, okay. So here's the problem, right? Is that what you don't want to do, I guess, in an ideal world is you don't want to just decide to latch onto and settle down with the very, very first person who shows you any interest at all. Because actually they might not be that well suited to you. And if you hold out a little bit longer, maybe you'll find someone who's better suited to you. But equally, you don't want to wait ever and ever and ever and ever because you may end up missing the person who was right for you turning them down because you think someone better is around the corner and then finding out that actually they were always the right person. So what you could do is you can set this up as though it's like a mathematical problem. So you've got a number of opportunities lined up in a row, sort of chronologically lined up. And your task is you want to stop at the perfect time. You want to stop at the”
2020-07-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #87 Hannah Fry: The Role of Algorithms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Watch there's maths in the data of what photographs work well on online dating or apps or websites. There's loads of math in designing your table plan for your wedding to make sure that people that don't like each other don't have to sit together instantly. My code's available if anyone wants it. There's even actually my favorite favorite one is there's even maths in the way that arguments between couples in long-term relationships, the dynamics of those arguments. So there's lots of little places that you can find a place to kind of latch on and use the math.”
2020-07-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #87 Hannah Fry: The Role of Algorithms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, so this was a, it was sort of a kind of private joke that got terribly out of hand, that book, where I would, you know, when I was sort of, you know, in the dating game or like, you know, designing my table plan for my wedding or like any of those things. I mean, I just generally apply maths to everything. And we're just trying to calculate as much as possible. I was trying to like game it as much as possible. And so in the end, wrote these up into a book and it's all very tongue-in-cheek. But the thing is, is that while I totally believe that you cannot write down an equation for real romance, you can't write down an equation for that sort of that spark of delight that you get when you meet someone and you know you really like them. There's no real math in that. But there's still loads of maths in lots of aspects of your love life, right? So there's maths in, you know, how many people you date before you decide to settle down.”
2020-07-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #87 Hannah Fry: The Role of Algorithms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very quickly, but rather than just come back with the response, they added in a random amount of time where it looked like the machinery was just ticking over, thinking very carefully about what the move was, when in reality it was just sitting there in a sort of holding pattern. And Kasparov himself, so in his latest book and in several interviews, had said that he was sitting there and was trying to second guess what the machine was doing at all times. So was trying to work out why this machine was stuck grunting through very difficult calculations and essentially got psyched out by the machine. Because I think all of the chess grandmasters pretty much uniformly in agreement that at that moment in time when the machine be Kasparov, Kasparov was still the better player, but it was the fact that he was a human, it was the fact that he had those human failings that meant that he was outsmarted by the machine.”
2020-07-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #87 Hannah Fry: The Role of Algorithms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And essentially everyone in the room knew that that was your cue to resign the game, which is just like so intimidating and just really like terrifying. The thing is, is that those tricks that Kasparoff had, I mean, they're not going to work on a machine, right? You've got the IBM guy sitting in the seat, but I mean, he's not the one making the moves. He's not the one playing. So, you know, it's not going to affect him at all. So none of that stuff worked in Caspar's favor. And yet, the other way around, the IBM machine could still use tricks on him. So there's a few reports, the IBM team deliberately coded their machine so that the way that it worked, right, he would sort of search for solutions. And depending on how long that search would take, it would be how quickly the answer came back. But they deliberately coded it so that sometimes in certain positions, the machine might find the answer.”
2020-07-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #87 Hannah Fry: The Role of Algorithms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so this goes exactly back to what I was saying earlier about it's not just about building a machine, it's about thinking about how that machine fits in with humans and fits in with human weaknesses because the thing is that Kasparov, I mean, he's an incredible player. So I had a chat when I was researching my book, I spoke to lots of different chess grandmasters. And one of them described him like a tornado. So when he would walk into the room, he would essentially pin people to the sides of the room. They would kind of clear a path for him because he was just so respected. And what he used to do had this trick. If he was playing you, he would take off his watch and he would place it down on the table next to him and then carry on playing. And then when he decided that he'd had enough toying with you, he would pick up his watch and he would put it back on as if to say that's time now, I'm done. I'm like, I'm not playing you anymore.”
2020-07-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #87 Hannah Fry: The Role of Algorithms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When it was shown to him, and so he said, Okay, I'll tell you what, I will give you a grain of rice for the first square and then we'll double the grains of rice every subsequent square, right? Which sounds like, oh, that's not very much at the beginning and it's like one grain, then two grains, and then four grains. It's like, okay, you know, this is.”
2020-07-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #87 Hannah Fry: The Role of Algorithms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, of course. I mean, part of the problem is that the word exponential just gets thrown around. Like, you know, people say, oh, this project's exponentially more difficult or, you know, exponentially more dangerous. It's like, well, no, it's not. That's not what the word means. And it is really counterintuitive because the thing about exponential growth, it doesn't just mean big. It doesn't just mean lots. It means something very specific. It means that it's where something is changing by a fixed fraction in a fixed period. So this virus, for instance, is doubling every five days. So doubling fixed fraction every five days is a fixed period. And I think that it's just, yeah, I mean, it's just not something that's counterintuitive at all. Like there's the really classic example of the rice on the chessboard. So this is this idea. It's like a classic story about an Indian king who was really impressed with the chessboard.”
2020-07-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #87 Hannah Fry: The Role of Algorithms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Incredibly detailed data set that's feeding right into the models that our government are using, making this enormous difference in terms of the accuracy of how well we can predict things. And I just think it's like, it's just the most pertinent and chilling example I've ever been part of, which just demonstrates how important the maths is if you're going to try and win a war with nature, essentially.”
2020-07-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #87 Hannah Fry: The Role of Algorithms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It sounds mad to say it, but given that everyone's carrying mobile phones, but up until a couple of years ago, the best possible data that we had within the UK at least for how people did that, how people moved and how people mixed with one another was a paper survey from 2006 where a thousand people said, oh yeah, I reckon I did this. I reckon I came into, I reckon I went about that fine. I reckon I came into contact with these people. So what we did with the help of the BBC, because you know they have such amazing reach, is we created this mobile app that would essentially track people, people would volunteer and sign up by watching the program and so on, and let us track them around for 24 hours and track who they came into contact with and also get loads of things about their demographics and their agents, so on and so on. Now, two years later or less than two years later, we have this.”
2020-07-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #87 Hannah Fry: The Role of Algorithms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, totally. So I actually, in 2018, I did a big project with BBC because we knew that a pandemic was coming. So we teamed up with some epidemiologists from the London School of Hygiene Tropical Medicine and the University of Cambridge to collect the best possible data so that we could be prepared for when something like this did happen. The big problem at that point, so this is only a couple of years ago, The big problem was that if you want to know how an epidemic or flu-like virus will spread through population, then you need to have really good data on how far people travel and how often people come into contact with one another and crucially who they come into contact with, the different age groups, the settings they come into contact with other people and so on. And up until a couple of years ago,”
2020-07-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #87 Hannah Fry: The Role of Algorithms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is because the math is telling us what is coming next. We don't have a crystal ball to look into the future, but really it matters the only thing that's there guiding us.”
2020-07-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #87 Hannah Fry: The Role of Algorithms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, exactly. So we're still at the stage where things are ramping up. I mean, you know, who knows how bad it's going to get from here. But certainly in the last month, I mean, they're the first ones really. The epidemiologists and the mathematical models are the ones who've been sort of raising the alarm and driving the decision making and driving the strategy and driving government policies because at the moment if you looked only at the numbers of where we are, I think there's been maybe 150 deaths or so in the UK. I haven't got the exact numbers to my fingertips, but something of that order, right? Around 100 deaths in the UK, which every single one of those is a real tragedy, but it's not a huge, huge, huge number. But the reason why we know that that's a why we're in a bad situation. And the reason why we know we need to take these extreme measures to essentially shut down our borders, to shut down our country.”
2020-07-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #87 Hannah Fry: The Role of Algorithms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Going to do a pertinent example because the thing that I think the example of what's going on right now with the pandemic is a really tragic and chilling example of how important mass can be when it comes to making clear decisions. Because I think that this is just one situation where in many ways maths is really the biggest weapon that we have on our side. You know, we don't have pharmaceutical interventions yet. We don't have a vaccine yet. And all we have really is the data and the numbers.”
2020-07-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #87 Hannah Fry: The Role of Algorithms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly that, especially if people vote you in, and here's a way that you can absolve yourself of responsibility. I completely agree. I think all of us do it. All of us do it. And that's the problem is that this is a really, really easy thing to happen. It's very easy for us to just, I don't know, take a cognitive shortcut and do what the machine tells us to do, which is why you have to be so careful about thinking about this interface, thinking about the kind of mistakes that people are going to make and how you mitigate against them by designing stuff to prevent that from happening.”
2020-07-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #87 Hannah Fry: The Role of Algorithms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That they would notice that the algorithm had made this terrible mistake and step in and overrule it. Well, turns out that, you know, those Japanese tourists we were talking about earlier, I think that judges are a lot more like them than we might want them to be. So in that case, and lots of other cases like it, actually the judge just sort of blindly followed what the algorithm had to say and increased the jail sentence of this individual. So, I mean, you've got to be really careful, right? You've got to be careful about putting too much faith in the algorithm. But just on the flip side of that judge's example, I also don't agree with the people who say, well, let's get rid of these things altogether in the judicial system. Because I think there is a reason for them being there, which is that humans are terrible decision makers, right? Like there's so much luck involved in the judicial system. There's studies that show that if you take the same case to different judges, you get...”
2020-07-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #87 Hannah Fry: The Role of Algorithms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Case really does do is it highlights just how illogical these algorithms can sometimes be because in that particular case if instead the young man had been I think 36 years old that would have been enough this this algorithm had put so much weight on his age that if he'd been 36 it would have been enough to tip the balance even though that put him at 22 years older than the girl right which I think surely by any possible metric makes this crime much worse but that would have been enough just to tip the balance and for the algorithm to believe that he was low risk and to recommend that he escape jail entirely which I think is just an extraordinary example of how wrong these decisions can go if you hand them over to the algorithm but I think for me the scary thing about that story is that the judge was still in the loop right the judge was still in the loop of that decision making process and I think that you would hope in that kind of situation”
2020-07-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #87 Hannah Fry: The Role of Algorithms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“From Virginia, and he was arrested for the statutory rape of a 14-year-old girl. So they had been having a consensual relationship, but she was underage and so he was, which is illegal and he was convicted. But during his trial, an algorithm assessed his chance of going on to commit another crime in future. These are the sort of very controversial, yeah, exactly algorithms that do so. But actually have been around for quite a long time. And this algorithm, it went through all of his data and it determined that because he was a very young man who was only 19 years old and he was already committing sexual offences, then he had a long life ahead of him and the chances of him committing another one in that long life were high. So it said that he was high risk and it recommended that he be given eighteen months jail time, which, I mean, I think you can argue that one way or the other, depending on your view, but I think what this”
2020-07-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #87 Hannah Fry: The Role of Algorithms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which I think is nice. There's definitely some situations where you want the humans as far away from it as possible. But I also think that actually these machines, especially the ones that are getting much more involved in more social decisions, they really are capable of making quite catastrophic mistakes. And I think that if you take the human out of the decision, even if on average you might have a slightly better, more consistent framework, if you take the human out of that decision process altogether, then I think that you risk real disasters. We certainly seen plenty of those in the judicial system of where algorithms have made decisions, judges have followed it blindly and it's been really the wrong thing. Just to give you an example, there was a young man called Christopher Drew Brooks. This is actually a few years ago, but he was 19 years old.”
2020-07-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #87 Hannah Fry: The Role of Algorithms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, so there's certainly some occasions where actually the further away humans are from it, the better. Humans, we're not very good at making decisions at all. We're not very good at being consistent. We're not very good at being clear. With nuclear power stations, for instance, as much as possible, you want to leave that to the algorithms. You want to leave that to the machines. Likewise in flying aeroplanes, I think you want to leave that to autopilot as much as you possibly can. In fact, actually that really nice joke to fly a plane, you need three things. A computer, a pilot, a human, and a dog. And the computer is there to fly the plane. The human is there to feed the dog, and the dog is there to bite the human if ever it touches the computer.”
2020-07-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #87 Hannah Fry: The Role of Algorithms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“the more scientific end of algorithms. I mean, I think, to be totally blunt, I think that unless you're doing science openly, you're not doing science. But yeah, I mean, so some of the suggestions have been, and I think this is one that I broadly support, some of the suggestions have been to copy the pharmaceutical industries model, so where you have a separate board like the FDA who have the ability to really interrogate these algorithms properly and can give a sort of rubber stamp of approval as to whether they are appropriate to be used or not. But that's different from just open source because, I mean, a sort of FDA style thing would be able to go in and stress test them and test them for robustness and check them for bias and all of those type of things instead. But I mean, there's no easy, there's no silver bullet to sort of address some of the many problems that algorithms raise.”
2020-07-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #87 Hannah Fry: The Role of Algorithms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Understanding of how it works enough to be able to say, okay, you know what, just sort of sanity check it if you like is just fast and I just don't think it's realistic that actually you can ask the community at large really to be able to take on that load but then simultaneously I think it's by doing so by releasing making everything open source then I think that you are going to stifle innovation right because I think that part of the really good thing part of the reason why we've seen such acceleration of these ideas is because it's possible to make them commercially viable and I think that if you publish things as open source then there's a problem with that that you risk slowing down innovation I think which is it which I don't think you'd want to do either the work around though you know okay so what do you do instead because I think that everybody sort of agrees that transparency is really important here I think particularly when it comes”
2020-07-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #87 Hannah Fry: The Role of Algorithms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I know, right? I know. It's so hard. It's so hard because I think it's very easy, you know, it's very easy to say there are definitely problems with algorithms that are not open source. It's very easy to say there are huge problems with transparency, but finding the way around it, finding the solutions is a lot harder. It's a lot harder. I mean, because I think actually I sort of am of the opinion that open source algorithms, at least the ones that are proprietary, at least the ones that have some sort of intellectual property attached to them, I think that that is both too much and too little. So what I mean by that is I think it's too little because if you publish the code, if you publish the source code of something, the level of technical knowledge and time actually that it would take to interrogate that as an outsider enough that you have a really good understanding.”
2020-07-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #87 Hannah Fry: The Role of Algorithms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The ones that then go on to be a problem, you're also going to be good at detecting the ones that are nothing to worry about. And hence, potentially causing huge numbers of people to have very serious and very invasive techniques like double masectomies, for instance, life-changing treatments, right, that actually they never needed to have. And that, I think, is something that's another thing about that boundary between how much do we trust our machines that I think is not resolved yet and a sort of tricky one for the next few years, I think.”
2020-07-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #87 Hannah Fry: The Role of Algorithms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of them had cancerous cells within their body, and the reason for this, it's not that they all had really serious cancer that needed to be detected and treated, it's that actually this happens a lot, right? It's not if you have breast cancer, for example, it's not a case of you don't have cancer or you do have cancer. There's a whole spectrum in between that. And in between, totally fine and really, really nasty cancerous cells, there are tumors that may turn out to be something bad and may just the body may deal with them or they may just stay there untouched and well into essentially all of your life and be nothing to worry about. And the real danger of relying too much on algorithms to detect those cancerous cells is that if you are too good at detecting them, you're not just good at detecting.”
2020-07-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #87 Hannah Fry: The Role of Algorithms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Radiologist to interrogate that image. So, okay, I think that's stage two, right? And that's like that's the difference between old type satin navs and new type sat navs. But I think that there's a stage three in medicine that we're only just beginning to go into, which is, I think, a harder, even harder one of all, which is that most cancerous cells in people's bodies actually are nothing to worry about, which sounds like a mad idea. But there was a study a few years ago, you have to forgive me slightly because I don't have all the numbers on the tip of my tongue, but there was a study a few years ago where a group of scientists performed autopsies on people who had died from a whole host of different causes, so everything from heart attacks, car crashes, all these different kind of things. And they looked deliberately to see whether they had cancerous cells in the body. And even though none of these patients had died from cancer, a huge percentage”
2020-07-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #87 Hannah Fry: The Role of Algorithms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it turned out that the algorithm wasn't really looking at the lesion itself at all. It was deciding whether or not it was cancerous based on whether there was a ruler photographed next to it or not, like that kind of stuff. It makes this stuff makes me stupid mistakes. So I think that that was sort of phase one of these sort of algorithms within medicine. I think phase two is about making them much more able to be interrogated. So for instance, a deep mind who I spent a long time working with on public outreach projects, one of their big systems is rather than just having an algorithm that tells you what the answer is, is having two separate AIs, right? Two separate agents. One of them that highlights areas of interest in the image itself. And then the second algorithm that goes in and labels them. But it's just kind of opening out the box a little bit more so that it's possible for a pathologist or a”
2020-07-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #87 Hannah Fry: The Role of Algorithms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so that I think is an incredibly tough example. So, okay, the first algorithms that came through the machine learning algorithms that were designed to just tell you whether there was cancerous cells within an image or not, right? Yes or no. And that's all very well. That's kind of, you know, that's good. And they proved themselves that they were good, that they could perform well in that. But they're problematic. There were examples where, you know, they'd go into a hospital, they'd been performing incredibly well on a certain set of images, and then suddenly they're performing incredibly badly. And these algorithms are so sensitive that they were picking up on things like the type of scanner that was used was making a difference to the decision process of the algorithm. Or like actually, the best example of that is there was a skin cancer diagnosis algorithm that was picking up on lesions on people's skins, photographs taken by dermatologists was the training set.”
2020-07-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #87 Hannah Fry: The Role of Algorithms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, right, that's it. That's it. So I think the shift in design that we've seen recently, and this is only very recently, is where you type in the address now. So I'm thinking in terms of Google Maps and Ways, certainly, and perhaps others, is that you type in the address and then up pops a map which gives you three options, right? So it's not saying I've made the decision for you, off you go. It's saying here is the calculations I've made now it's down to you, but it's giving you that, I guess that last step where you can overrule it, where you can kind of sanity check it if you like. And I think I like to, I mean, I sort of, maybe I'm giving them a bit too much credit. They did drive out into the ocean, but I sort of think these tourists had been seen a map for showing that they were going into the ocean. Maybe they wouldn't have done it.”
2020-07-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #87 Hannah Fry: The Role of Algorithms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And amazingly, amazingly, the story. You'd think, okay, fine, right? You know, like you get to the ocean and you're like, well, no, it's obviously asking me to drive into the ocean. I'm not going to. They didn't have that moment. They carried on driving. They really trusted the machine and thought, oh, well, it'll bring us to a path eventually. And eventually they had to abandon their vehicle, I think, like 300 meters out into the oceans. It's amazing. It's like half an hour later as the tide came in, a ferry sailed past, they abandoned her.”
2020-07-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #87 Hannah Fry: The Role of Algorithms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There are all sorts of stories about people just blindly following their sat-nav. So my favorite example is there was a group of Japanese tourists in Brisbane. This is a few years ago who wanted to go visit this very popular tourist destination on an island off the coast of Brisbane, got a sat now, put it in, didn't look at the map, off they went, didn't realise the satnav was essentially telling them to drive out into the ocean.”
2020-07-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #87 Hannah Fry: The Role of Algorithms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just as a silly example, a kind of more trivial example, I think that the way that some sat navs used to be designed, this is less true now, but certainly the way that some sat navs used to be designed was that you would just type it in and it would tell your destination and off you went, right? Tell you where you were going and off you went. And you could, if you wanted to, go in and interrogate the interface and find out exactly where the thing was sending you. But most of all, you'd put in the address and it would just tell you where to go. And that is an example, I think, of not thinking clearly about the interface between the human and the machine.”
2020-07-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #87 Hannah Fry: The Role of Algorithms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just destroyed they did destroy the heckling and everything. It was amazing. It was amazing. I think for me, that was just this really, really important moment because I think it just hadn't quite twigged with me. I know that it makes me sound really naive, but it hadn't quite twigged in my mind that you can't just build an algorithm, put it on a shelf and decide whether you think it's good or bad in completely in isolation. You have to think about how the algorithm actually integrates with the world that you're embedding in. And I think that that's a mistake that sounds like it's really obvious, but actually I've seen lots and lots of people make that mistake repeatedly over the last few years and continue to make it.”
2020-07-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #87 Hannah Fry: The Role of Algorithms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Help the police to control an entire city's worth of people. That was essentially what I was saying. And it just hadn't occurred to me that, you know, if there is one city in the entire world where people are probably not going to be that keen on that idea, it's going to be Berlin. So I'm just like totally, yeah, I just didn't think it through. Anyway, so as a result, the Q&A of this session, I mean, they destroyed it and quite rightly say they destroyed me standing on the table.”
2020-07-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #87 Hannah Fry: The Role of Algorithms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Them a better grasp on how things were about to spread. So, okay, we wrote up this paper and the academic community were really happy with it, whatever. And a couple of years later, I went off to this big conference in Berlin and gave a talk. There was like 1,500 people there at this talk. And I was standing on stage giving a talk about this paper. And I think that I think I was a bit naive really. I think I was a bit foolish at the time because when you're a mathematician, there's no Hippocratic oath for mathematicians, right? There's no like, you don't have to worry about the ethics of, I don't know, fluid particles when you're running equations on them. And so I was standing on stage and I was presenting this paper and I was giving this very enthusiastic presentation. I was essentially saying how great it was that now with data and algorithms we were in a world where we could”
2020-07-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #87 Hannah Fry: The Role of Algorithms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Put it in the human world. So, this is back in as soon as I finished my PhD back in 2011, the first project really that I did was a collaboration with the Metropolitan Police in London. So we just had in 2011, we had these terrible riots across the country that started off as protests against police brutality, but they evolved into something else and a lot of looting. There was a lot of social unrest, really. And the police had been, I think, slightly stunned by how quickly this had taken hold. I mean, you know, we were for four days really, the city was on lockdown, London certainly was on lockdown. So we'd been working in collaboration with the police just to see if there had been anything they could have done earlier just to calm things down, I guess, to just see if there was, if there were signatures or patterns in the data that would have given”
2020-07-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #87 Hannah Fry: The Role of Algorithms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the most sort of famous examples of this there's Cathy O'Neill's book, Weapons of Maths Destruction, which I think honed in on one aspect of this really brilliantly, which is the bias that comes out when you don't think very carefully about taking this algorithm and planting it in the middle of society and expecting everyone to just fit in around it. The sort of gender bias that we've seen, the racial bias, all of that stuff, I think that's very well documented and quite well known and understood about. But I think there are slightly more subtle things as well. Like, so the example that makes this a really personal story for me is that, and the reason I guess why I started thinking about this very clearly and or very seriously, and the reason why I wrote a book about it. So it's because of something that happened to me where I think I made that same mistake, where I got so tunnel vision about the mass that I didn't think about what it meant when you...”
2020-07-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #87 Hannah Fry: The Role of Algorithms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I think that actually that whole idea of humanizing maths, I think it sort of works both ways actually. I think that you need to humanize maths to make people want to find out more about it. But I also think that the maths itself needs to be humanized if it's to properly fit in with our society. Because I think this is something that's happened a lot actually in the last decade, certainly. I think that people have got very, very excited about data and about what data can tell us about ourselves. And I think that people have sort of rushed ahead and maybe not always thought very carefully about what happens when you build an algorithm, when you build something based on data and just expect humans to fit in around it. And I think that that actually has had quite catastrophic consequences.”
2020-07-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #87 Hannah Fry: The Role of Algorithms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I think it's that for me, it's humanizing it. I think that really is it for me. I think one of the, certainly in Britain, I think in the States too, there's this massive book called Fermat's Last Theorem, massive as in terms of its sales rather than physically big. It was written by Simon Singh. And I read it when I was maybe 16 years old. And one of the things that really, I guess solidified the idea that I wanted to be a mathematician. And in it, it's just a long story of hardcore maths throughout the century. But what he did was he anchored all of the stories to the people that were involved.”
2020-07-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #87 Hannah Fry: The Role of Algorithms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What happens in that race, you live the whole emotional roller coaster with them as the series progresses. And I think if you take that out of the situation, then actually I think it dehumanizes it and makes it less interesting in a way.”
2020-07-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #87 Hannah Fry: The Role of Algorithms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, I see, I don't know if I agree with you, actually. Pushback. So, yeah, first back, I'm sorry, so early on. So, okay, so partly there are examples of that already. There's a, I think it's called Robo Race, which is the fastest autonomous vehicles in the world. There's different teams build the cars and it's like robot wars, right? But on a track. And it's all very fun. It's all very interesting. But for me, I think that part of the problem with why mass communication is difficult is that really we care a lot about stories and we care a lot about stories of people. And I think that in many ways, the thing that makes Formula One or other racing so fascinating to watch is because you have it sitting in that gigantic engineered machine with so much science and technology going into it. You have a person who cares so much about”
2020-07-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #87 Hannah Fry: The Role of Algorithms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A perfect analogy, it's a perfect analogy. I always think so a big fan actually of Formula One and the reason why I like it, if I'm honest with you, is because I think of it as a giant maths competition, just with, you know, a bit of glamour on top”
2020-07-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #87 Hannah Fry: The Role of Algorithms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, yeah, but I think that unfortunately the math is invisible, right? Because, I mean, for this stuff to work, for a mobile phone to work, it has to be all of, I mean, the amount of maths involved in getting your mobile phone, or, you know, in me speaking to you now, however many thousand miles apart we are, the amount of maths involved is like phenomenal. I mean, it's easily PhD level stuff. But for this to work effectively, it has to be invisible. It has to be hidden completely behind the scenes. You as the user can't really be aware that any of it is there. So even though, you know, as you say, with algorithms dominating more and more of the way that we're communicating with each other, how we're accessing information, you know, what we're watching, who we're dating, everything. Even so, I think the maths is so behind the scenes that I don't think it's necessarily clear that it's driving so much of the change.”
2020-07-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #87 Hannah Fry: The Role of Algorithms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT