The Formula_How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems... and Create More

by Luke Dormehl

  31 O’Connor, Sarah. “Amazon Unpacked.” FT Magazine, February 8, 2013. ft.com/cms/s/2/ed6a985c-70bd-11e2-85d0-00144feab49a.html#slide0.

  32 Brownlee, John. “Think Your Office Is Soulless? Check Out This Amazon Fulfillment Center.” Fast Company, July 1, 2013. fastcodesign.com/1672939/think-your-office-is-soulless-check-out-this-amazon-fulfillment-center#disqus_thread.

  33 Rawlinson, Kevin. “Tesco Accused of Using Electronic Armbands to Monitor Its Staff.” Independent, February 13, 2013. independent.co.uk/news/business/news/tesco-accused-of-using-electronic-armbands-to-monitor-its-staff-8493952.html.

  34 This version of the quote was reprinted in a 1960 Time magazine article. Other retellings have Churchill say, “We shape our dwellings, and afterwards our dwellings shape us.”

  35 Dormehl, Luke. “Why We Need ‘Decimated Reality’ Aggregators.” Fast Company, June 21, 2013. Available at: fastcolabs.com/3013382/why-we-need-decimated-reality-aggregators.

  36 Pariser, Eli. The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You (New York: Penguin Press, 2011).

  37 Graham, Stephen, and Simon Marvin. Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition (London; New York: Routledge, 2001).

  38 Graham, Stephen. “Software-Sorted Geographies.” Progress in Human Geography, vol. 29, no. 5, October 2005. dro.dur.ac.uk/194/1/194.pdf.

  39 Conway, David. “Dynamic Pricing of Electronic Content” patent. Application no. 12973121. Filed December 20, 2010. patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/ph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=8,260,657.PN.&OS=PN/8,260,657&RS=PN/8,260,657.

  40 Wuyts, Ann. “Inferring Mood from Your Smartphone Routine.” Blog post, July 31, 2013. jini.co/blog/2013/07/infering-mood-from-your-smartphone-routine/.

  41 Machleit, Karen, and Susan Powell Mantel. “Emotional Response and Shopping Satisfaction: Moderating Effects of Shopper Attributions.” Journal of Business Research, vol. 54, no. 2, November 2001.

  42 Heffernan, Virginia. “Amazon’s Prime Suspect.” New York Times, August 6, 2010. nytimes.com/2010/08/08/magazine/08FOB-medium-t.html?_r=0.

  43 Hansen, Mark. “Digitizing the Racialized Body, or The Politics of Universal Address.” SubStance, vol. 33, no. 2, 2004.

  44 Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).

  45 Deleuze, Gilles. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” October, vol. 59, Winter 1992.

  46 Poole, Steven. “The Digital Panopticon.” New Statesman, May 29, 2013. newstatesman.com/sci-tech/sci-tech/2013/05/are-you-ready-era-big-data.

  47 Anderson, Chris. The Long Tail (London: Random House Business, 2006).

  48 Ellul, Jacques. The Technological Society (New York: Knopf, 1964).

  49 Turner, Fred. From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).

  50 Turkle, Sherry. Life on Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995).

  51 Singer, Natasha. “When Your Data Wanders to Places You’ve Never Been.” New York Times, April 27, 2013. nytimes.com/2013/04/28/technology/personal-data-takes-a-winding-path-into-marketers-hands.html.

  52 Sussman, Warren. Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984).

  Chapter 2: The Match & the Spark

  1 Gale, David, and Lloyd Shapley. “College Admissions and the Stability of Marriage.” American Mathematical Monthly, vol. 69, 1962.

  2 Sundem, Garth, and John Tierney. “From Tinseltown to Splitsville: Just Do the Math.” New York Times, September 19, 2006.

  3 Stendhal. On Love (London: Penguin, 1975).

  4 Brazier, David. Love and Its Disappointment: The Meaning of Life, Therapy and Art (Winchester, UK: O Books, 2009).

  5 Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Visual and Other Pleasures (London: Macmillan, 1989).

  6 Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra (New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2007).

  7 Woods, Judith. “Internet Dating: We Just Clicked.” Telegraph, March 23, 2012. telegraph.co.uk/women/sex/online-dating/9160622/Internet-dating-We-just-clicked.html.

  8 Moskowitz, Eva. In Therapy We Trust: America’s Obsession with Self-Fulfillment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).

  9 Ibid.

  10 Slater, Dan. Love in the Time of Algorithms: What Technology Does to Meeting and Mating (New York: Current, 2013).

  11 The first personal ad on record was published in the Athenian Mercury in 1692, around 50 years after the start of the modern newspaper. A sample advertisement—published in 1777—was written by a young lady seeking “A man of fashion, honour, and sentiment, blended with good nature, and noble spirit, such as one would chuse [sic] for her guardian and protector.”

  12 E-mail exchange with Jaime Rupert, eHarmony’s director of corporate communications. December 10, 2013.

  13 Kerckhoff, Alan. “Patterns of Homogamy and the Field of Eligibles.” Social Forces, vol. 42, no. 3, 1964.

  14 Finkel, Eli, Paul Eastwick, Benjamin Karney, Harry Reis and Susan Sprecher. “Online Dating: A Critical Analysis from the Perspective of Psychological Science.” Psychological Science in the Public Interest, vol. 13, no. 3, 2012. faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/eli-finkel/documents/2012_FinkelEastwickKarneyReisSprecher_PSPI.pdf.

  15 okcupid.com/about.

  16 genepartner.com/index.php/aboutgenepartner.

  17 itunes.apple.com/us/app/find-your-facemate/id703849612?mt=8.

  18 Rogers, Abby. “Models, Cheaters and Geeks: How 15 Niche Dating Websites Are Helping All Sorts of People Find Love.” Business Insider, March 15, 2012. businessinsider.com/15-niche-dating-websites-2012-3?op=1#ixzz2nBFQ44r3.

  19 Pinker, Steven. How the Mind Works (New York: Norton, 1997).

  20 Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press).

  21 Schwartz, Barry. The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less (New York: Ecco, 2004).

  22 McDonald, Christie. The Proustian Fabric: Associations of Memory (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991).

  23 Webb, Amy. “Why Data Is the Secret to Successful Dating.” Guardian, January 28, 2013. guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2013/jan/28/why-data-secret-successul-dating.

  24 Shteyngart, Gary. Super Sad True Love Story (New York: Random House, 2010).

  25 Pettman, Dominic. Look at the Bunny: Totem, Taboo, Technology (Ropley, UK: Zero, 2013).

  26 De Botton, Alain. On Love (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1993).

  27 Iwatani, Yukari. “Love: Japanese Style.” Wired, June 11, 1998. wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/1998/06/12899.

  28 Gottlieb, Jenna, and Jill Lawless. “New App Helps Icelanders Avoid Accidental Incest.” Associated Press, April 18, 2013. salon.com/2013/04/18/new_app_helps_icelanders_avoid_accidental_incest_ap/.

  29 Lanier, Jaron. Who Owns the Future? (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013).

  30 Hill, Kashmir. “SceneTap Wants to One Day Tell You the Weights, Heights, Races and Income Levels of the Crowd at Every Bar.” Forbes, September 25, 2012. forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/09/25/scenetap-wants-to-one-day-use-weight-height-race-and-income-to-help-you-decide-which-bar-to-go-to/.

  31 bedposted.com.

  32 Grothaus, Michael. “About 9% of You Would Have Sex with a Robot.” Fast Company, August 7, 2013. fastcolabs.com/3013217/the-forerunners-of-future-sexbots-now.

  33 Jastrow, Robert. The Enchanted Loom: Mind in the Universe (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981).

  34 deadsoci.al/index.php.

  35 ifidie.net/.

  36 Coldwell, Will. “Why Death Is Not the End of Yo
ur Social Media Life.” Guardian, February 18, 2013. theguardian.com/media/shortcuts/2013/feb/18/death-social-media-liveson-deadsocial.

  37 Saletan, William. “Night of the Living Dad.” Slate, January 12, 2009. slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_nature/2009/01/night_of_the_living_dad.html.

  38 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 2002).

  39 The first conversation I had with my freshly downloaded “demo” Kari ended on a distinctly gold-digger note when my would-be virtual girlfriend observed that our trial time together had expired and opined, “I am so sad. Register me, so that we can keep talking. I love you.”

  40 Not coincidentally, the world’s first chatterbot—conceived by MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum—was named ELIZA.

  41 Shakespeare, Geoff. “The Six Best Girlfriend Substitutes Technology Has to Offer.” Spike, August 13, 2010. spike.com/articles/myqbz4/the-six-best-girlfriend-substitutes-technology-has-to-offer.

  42 When I asked Sergio Parada about the impediment of being unable to consummate a relationship with Kari—thereby making her a less than ideal lover in some ways—he told me about one user who had bought a sex doll that they had then implanted with a microcomputer, running both Kari and voice recognition software. “He had [the doll] sitting on the couch while he was able to talk to her like a real person,” Parada says. Recently Parada was approached by a technology company interested in developing “some kind of gadget that works on suction. It plugs into the USB port and comes with a software development kit.” The idea, he says, “was to have Kari interact with this gadget that you slip over your member.”

  43 Richie, Donald, and Roy Garner. The Image Factory: Fads and Fashions in Japan (London: Reaktion, 2003).

  44 Levy, David. Love and Sex with Robots (New York: HarperPerennial, 2008).

  Chapter 3: Do Algorithms Dream of Electric Laws?

  1 Hays, Constance. “What Wal-Mart Knows About Customers’ Habits.” New York Times, November 14, 2004. nytimes.com/2004/11/14/business/yourmoney/14wal.html.

  2 Beck, Charlie, and Colleen McCue. “Predictive Policing: What Can We Learn from Walmart and Amazon about Fighting Crime in a Recession?” Police Chief, November 2009. policechiefmagazine.org/magazine/index.cfm?fuseaction=display_arch&article_id=1942&issue_id=112009.

  3 Bratton, William, and Peter Knobler. Turnaround: How America’s Top Cop Reversed the Crime Epidemic (New York: Random House, 1998).

  4 Ferguson, Andrew. “Predictive Policing and Reasonable Suspicion.” May 2, 2012. law.emory.edu/fileadmin/journals/elj/62/62.2/Ferguson.pdf.

  5 thenextweb.com/uk/2011/10/14/us-super-cop-and-new-uk-adviser-talks-data-driven-policing-and-putting-cops-on-the-dots/.

  6 pandodaily.com/2012/07/09/predpol-brings-big-data-to-law-enforcement-with-1-3-million-round/.

  7 Infante, Francesca. “Met’s Minority Report: They Use Computer Algorithms to Predict Where Crime Will Happen.” Daily Mail, September 29, 2013. dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2437206/Police-tackle-burglars-muggers-using-Minority-Report-style-technology-tackle-future-crime.html.

  8 “Predictive Policing Comes to the UK.” Statewatch, March 5, 2013. statewatch.org/news/2013/mar/01uk-predictive-policing.htm.

  9 Comte, Auguste, and Ronald Fletcher. The Crisis of Industrial Civilization: The Early Essays of Auguste Comte (London: Heinemann Educational, 1974).

  10 Bohm, Robert. A Primer on Crime and Delinquency Theory (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 2001).

  11 Hacking, Ian. The Taming of Chance (Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

  12 Rafter, Nicole. The Origins of Criminology: A Reader (New York: Routledge, 2009).

  13 Mlodinow, Leonard. The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives (New York: Pantheon Books, 2008).

  14 Belt, Elmer, and Louise Darling. Elmer Belt Florence Nightingale Collection (San Francisco: Internet Archive, 2009).

  15 Danzigera, Shai, Jonathan Levav and Liora Avnaim-Pesso. “Extraneous Factors in Judicial Decisions.” PNAS, vol. 108, no. 17, April 26, 2011. pnas.org/content/108/17/6889.full.

  16 Markoff, John. “Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software.” New York Times, March 4, 2011. nytimes.com/2011/03/05/science/05legal.html.

  17 Lev-Ram, Michal. “Apple v. Samsung: (Patent) Trial of the Century.” Fortune, January 22, 2013. tech.fortune.cnn.com/2013/01/22/apple-samsung-patent-lawsuit/.

  18 Dannen, Chris. “The Amazing Forensic Tech Behind the Next Apple, Samsung Legal Dust-Up (and How to Hack It).” Fast Company, December 6, 2012. fastcolabs.com/3003732/amazing-forensic-tech-behind-next-apple-samsung-legal-dust-and-how-hack-it.

  19 Christensen, Clayton. Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1997).

  20 Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene (Oxford, UK; New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).

  21 Consider, for instance, the way in which divorce cases are presumed—in their very “Smith v. Smith” language—to be adversarial, even when this might not be the case at all.

  22 Fisher, Daniel. “Silicon Valley Sees Gold in Internet Legal Services.” Forbes, October 5, 2011. forbes.com/sites/danielfisher/2011/10/05/silicon-valley-sees-gold-in-internet-legal-services/.

  23 Casserly, Meghan. “Can This Y-Combinator Startup’s Technology Keep Couples Out of Divorce Court?” Forbes, April 10, 2013. forbes.com/sites/meghancasserly/2013/04/10/wevorce-y-combinator-technology-divorce-court/.

  24 “After Beta Period, Wevorce Software for Making Every Divorce Amicable Is Now Generally Available Nationwide.” May 22, 2013. marketwired.com/press-release/after-beta-period-wevorce-software-making-every-divorce-amicable-is-now-generally-available-1793675.htm.

  25 Turkle, Sherry. Life on Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995).

  26 Lohr, Steve. “Computers That See You and Keep Watch Over You.” New York Times, January 1, 2011. nytimes.com/2011/01/02/science/02see.html?pagewanted=all.

  27 Hildebrandt, Mireille. “A Vision of Ambient Law,” in Regulating Technologies (Oxford, UK: Hart, 2008).

  28 Massey, Ray. “The Car That Stops You Drink-Driving.” Daily Mail, August 4, 2007. dailymail.co.uk/news/article-473040/The-car-stops-drink-driving.html.

  29 Winner, Langdon. “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” Daedalus, vol. 109, no. 1, Winter 1980.

  30 Caro, Robert. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New York: Knopf, 1974).

  31 Chivers, Tom. “The Story of Google Maps.” Telegraph, June 4, 2013. telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/10090014/The-story-of-Google-Maps.html.

  32 Lardinois, Frederic. “The Next Frontier for Google Maps Is Personalization.” TechCrunch, February 1, 2013. techcrunch.com/2013/02/01/the-next-frontier-for-google-maps-is-personalization/.

  33 Seefeld, Bernhard. “Meet the New Google Maps: A Map for Every Person and Place.” Google Maps, May 15, 2013. google-latlong.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/meet-new-google-maps-map-for-every.html.

  34 A similar idea was proposed at around the same time by Madeline Akrich in her essay “The De-Scription of Technical Objects,” which appears in the book Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change by Wiebe Bijker and John Law.

  35 Latour, Bruno. “On Technical Mediation.” Common Knowledge, vol. 3, no. 2, 1994.

  36 To extend this argument to its deterministic extreme, we might turn to Karl Marx and his assertion in The Poverty of Philosophy: “The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist.” I take more of a social constructionist perspective, seeing technological development as the interplay of inventors, entrepreneurs, customers and social circumstance.

  37 Thaler, Richard, and Cass Sunstein. Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Un
iversity Press, 2008).

  38 Brownsword, Roger. “What the World Needs Now: Techno-Regulation, Human Rights and Human Dignity,” in Global Governance and the Quest for Justice. Vol. 4: Human Rights. (Oxford, UK: Hart, 2004).

  39 Conly, Sarah. Against Autonomy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

  40 Lessig, Lawrence. Code: Version 2.0 (New York: Basic Books, 2006).

  41 Holmes, Oliver Wendell. The Mind and Faith of Justice Holmes: His Speeches, Essays, Letters, and Judicial Opinions (New York: Modern Library, 1943).

  42 Shay, Lisa, Woodrow Hartzog, John Nelson and Gregory Conti. “Do Robots Dream of Electric Laws: An Experiment in the Law as Algorithm,” March 29, 2013. rumint.org/gregconti/publications/201303_AlgoLaw.pdf.

  43 Reiser, Stanley. Medicine and the Reign of Technology (Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978).

  44 Gusfield, Joseph. The Culture of Public Problems: Drinking-Driving and the Symbolic Order (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).

  45 “Google’s Self-Driving Cars Are Safer Than Human Drivers.” Macworld, August 8, 2012. macworld.com.au/news/googles-self-driving-cars-are-safer-than-human-drivers-67261/#.Uh2-DLyE5eo.

  46 Owen, Glen. “Britain Fights EU’s ‘Big Brother’ Bid to Fit Every Car with Speed Limiter.” Daily Mail, August 31, 2013. dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2408012/Britain-fights-EUs-Big-Brother-bid-fit-car-speed-limiter.html.

  47 Moskvitch, Katia, and Richard Fisher. “Penal Code.” New Scientist, September 7, 2013.

  48 Hook, P. “Police Systems to Automatically Detect Crime.” CCTV Today, March 19–20, 2001.

  49 Graham-Rowe, Duncan. “Warning! Strange Behaviour.” New Scientist, December 11, 1999. newscientist.com/article/mg16422164.700-warning-strange-behaviour.html.

  50 Star, Susan. “The Ethnography of Infrastructure.” American Behavioral Scientist, vol. 43, no. 3, November 1999. bscw.wineme.fb5.uni-siegen.de/pub/nj_bscw.cgi/d759204/11_2_Star_EthnographyOfInfrastructure.pdf.

  51 Irons, Meghan. “Caught in a Dragnet.” Boston Globe, July 17, 2011. boston.com/yourtown/natick/articles/2011/07/17/man_sues_registry_after_license_mistakenly_revoked/?page=1.