Algorithms: The Life Blood of the FANGs.

• Author: McKinley, Vern

The Ethical Algorithm: The Science of Socially Aware Algorithm Design

By Michael Kearns and Erin Roth

228 pp.; Oxford University Press, 2019

Algorithms are omnipresent but not always noticeable because they work in the background of our everyday activity. When we follow directions to get our family to that new restaurant, when we apply for a credit card, or when our soon-to-be high school graduate submits a college application, we are interacting with algorithms. These three basic activities Erin Roth in their book The Ethical Algohave been an integral part of life for generations.

The significant difference is that they are now automated, often with the aid of artificial intelligence such as machine learning. To isolate just one of these three examples, consider how the credit approval process has evolved over the past 100 years. In the early part of the 20th century, a loan was in large measure based on character as judged by a face-to-face meeting with a loan officer, supported by a few pages of paperwork on finances dropped into a loan file. When the credit card industry was in its infancy during the mid-20th century, a retail sales clerk used a rotary phone to call an authorization clerk who would look through stacks of computer-generated paper reports to determine if someone was approved for a credit card or an individual purchase.

That clunky process has been modernized, as explained by Michael Kearns and Erin Roth in their book The Ethical Algorithm. They write:

When you apply for a credit card, your application may never be examined by a human being. Instead an algorithm pulling in data about you (and perhaps also about people "like you") from many different sources might automatically approve or deny your request. Kearns and Roth are faculty members in the computer science department at the University of Pennsylvania. They specialize in and have published widely on algorithms, machine learning, and algorithmic game theory. Both have also co-authored academic books in this field: Kearns with An Introduction to Computational Learning Theory and Roth with The Algorithmic Foundations of Differential Privacy. In The Ethical Algorithm the authors try to address the less technical reader. To that end, they start with a simplified definition of an algorithm: "a very precisely specified series of instructions for performing a concrete task."

The placement of "ethical" in the book's title makes sense because one of the themes that arises...