Rage Inside the Machine: The prejudice of algorithms and how to stop the internet making bigots of us all

Robert Elliott Smith Bloomsbury $29.99

WITH TECHNOLOGY an ever-growing and increasingly intrusive feature of our daily lives, Robert Smith’s book is perfectly timed and uncannily thought-provoking.

Most of us comfort ourselves with the idea that technology – and the algorithms that drive it – is free of the morals and prejudice that characterise human intelligence. Smith’s thesis is clear: machine intelligence isn’t as objective as we’d like to think, and it’s high time we acknowledged this and acted accordingly.

Most entrancingly, Smith – who trained as an engineer and has spent his career in computer science and AI – explores the historical and cultural foundations that shaped the creation of algorithms. Far from a dry work that’s focused on maths and engineering, Rage Inside the Machine shifts seamlessly between history, philosophy and technology to create a savvy discourse that allows ordinary folk into the somewhat obscure world of the techno elite. Those clever nerds writing code in Silicon Valley: what do we know of them, really?

“At large technology corporations like Google and Facebook,” Smith writes, “there are whole communities of scientists like me interacting and working on the creation of algorithms that now frame and act upon our lives.”

Algorithms might treat society as a body of statistics, says Smith, but their creators are individuals from different cultures and very much imbued with their own ideas.

Smith’s message is to be aware, “because the only way to really understand the impact of algorithms is to understand them in relationship to the individuals and society to which they are bound.”