77 Quotes by Hannah Fry

You can't assess the value of an innovation in isolation, you have to consider whose hands it's in.

No weather forecaster can tell you for sure when to wear a rain slicker, stock up on canned goods, or evacuate a city that's in a cyclone's path. All forecasters can offer is their best guess at the atmosphere of the future, whispered by the simulated blue marble and wrapped up in uncertainty.

Because for me, equations and symbols aren't just a thing. They're a voice that speaks out about the incredible richness of nature and the startling simplicity in the patterns that twist and turn and warp and evolve all around us, from how the world works to how we behave.

People are often quite lazy. We like taking the easy way out - we like handing over responsibility, we like being offered shortcuts that mean we don't have to think.

But the threat of a pandemic is different from that of a nerve agent, in that a disease can spread uncontrollably, long after the first carrier has succumbed.

In our urge to automate, in our eagerness to adopt the latest innovations, we appear to have developed a habit of unthinkingly handing over power to machines.

Every time you shop online, every time you sign up for a newsletter, or register on a website, or enquire about a new car, or fill out a warranty card, or buy a new home, or register to vote - you are unwittingly handing over a small clue as to who you are and how you behave.

We have this imbalance where the people who are making algorithms aren't talking to the people who are using them. And the people who are using them aren't talking to the people who are having decisions made about their lives by them.

But for me, true art can't be created by accident. There are boundaries to the reach of algorithms. Limits to what can be quantified. Among all of the staggeringly impressive, mindboggling things that data and statistics can tell me, how it feels to be human isn't one of them.