Danny Crichton in City Journal:
Digital quantification determines Americans’ quality of life. Algorithms select job applicants for interviews and employees for performance bonuses. They aggregate stories and products as we shop for news and goods, matching our preferences to the infinite bounty on offer. And they determine which homes we can buy, purchases we can make, and investments we can pursue. In love, the whims of Hinge’s matching algorithms will determine our romantic fate; in health, a nonprofit network will use its algorithm to allocate a kidney or liver donation—saving one life over another.
Algorithms dominate our lives because commerce dominates our lives. Competitive companies have a strong economic incentive to replace expensive and inattentive human decision-makers with reliable and cheap computational ones. For most, the weeks-long work of securing a mortgage, for example, has been replaced by faster digital approvals available through a website or app. The transition is so complete that the rapturous wonder of these new technologies has mostly subsided, replaced by astonishment when we stumble upon the old ways such things used to be done.
Government, ironically, is one place where direction by algorithm has barely made a dent.
More here.
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