HOW did you decide to read this review? If you were holding the magazine in your hands, the decision was probably yours alone, but online, what you clicked on may have been influenced by curating bots run by the likes of Google and Facebook. In Automate This, journalist Christopher Steiner details how we have ceded decisions about stock trading, music-making, medical diagnoses and more to computer algorithms – and how they often do a better job than human professionals.
Steiner recounts how the algorithmic takeover began as long ago as the 1970s, when a computer programmer, Thomas Peterffy, wrote software to…
