I worked as a mathematician that that as a quantum finance I saw the worst of finance I went into data science and I was struck by what I thought was essentially a lie namely that algorithms were being presented and marketed as objective fact a much more accurate description of an algorithm is that it's an opinion embedded in math an algorithm is a very general concept it's something that we do actually in our heads every day to build an algorithm we need only two things essentially as historical data set and a definition of success so I
build an algorithm to cook dinner for my family the data that use on a daily basis is the ingredients in my kitchen sometimes the time I have the ambition I have for that dinner and then I assess the dinner after the fact was it a success I define that because I'm the one who's building the meals I'm in charge I have the power so there's always a power element here so I get to decide a meal is successful if my kids ate vegetables my kids if they were in charge would have defined it differently and
it matters because as we optimize over time we optimize to success the succession of meals that I cook from month to month is a very different path of meals than if my son were in charge so we do that every time we build algorithms we curate our data we define success we embed our values into algorithms so when people tell you algorithms make things objective you say no algorithms make things work for the builders of the algorithms in general we have a situation where algorithms are extremely powerful in our daily lives but there's a barrier
between us and the people building them and those people are typically coming from a kind of a homogeneous group of people who have their particular incentives if it's if it's in a corporate setting usually profit and not usually a question of fairness for the people who are subject to their algorithms so we always have to penetrate this fortress we have to be able to question the algorithms themselves especially when they're very important to us we have to inject ethics into the process of building Algar and that starts with data scientists agreeing and signing a Hippocratic
oath of modeling but we have to stop lightly trusting algorithms to be fair they are not inherently fair and start looking into what they're actually doing [Music]
