77 Quotes by Hannah Fry

How good is good enough? Once you’ve built a flawed algorithm that can calculate something, should you let it?

The problem is that we don’t really know what we want until we find it. Unlike with Amazon or Netflix, where we truly know our tastes in films and other products, a questionnaire about our personal preferences just isn’t enough to predict who will make us happy. Ultimately, finding a partner is just a lot more complicated than buying a DVD box set.

It’s a phenomenon known to psychologists as social proof. Whenever we haven’t got enough information to make decisions for ourselves, we have a habit of copying the behaviour of those around us.

It’s rarely obvious what our data can do, or, when fed into a clever algorithm, just how valuable it can be. Nor, in turn, how cheaply we were bought.

The most successful relationships are ones with a really low negativity threshold. In those relationships, couples allow each other to complain, and work together to constantly repair the tiny issues between them. In such cases, couples don’t bottle up their feelings, and little things don’t end up being blown completely out of proportion.

Well, there were a few items in someone’s basket that were linked to low claim rates. The most significant, he told me, the one that gives you away as a responsible, houseproud person more than any other, was fresh fennel.

Even if there are some objective criteria that make one artwork better than another, as long as context plays a role in our aesthetic appreciation of art, it’s not possible to create a tangible measure for aesthetic quality that works for all places in all times. Whatever statistical techniques, or artificial intelligence tricks, or machine-learning algorithms you deploy, trying to use numbers to latch on to the essence of artistic excellence is like clutching at smoke with your hands.

And in the UK, cameras mounted on vehicles that look like souped-up Google StreetView cars now drive around automatically cross-checking our likenesses with a database of wanted people.

The future doesn't just happen. We are building it, and we are building it all the time.