Most people don't have any association in their minds with what they do and with ethics. They think they somehow moved past the questions of morality or values or ethics, and that's something that I've never imagined to be true.

I think big data companies only like good news. So I think they're just hoping that they don't get sued, essentially.

I know how models are built, because I build them myself, so I know that I'm embedding my values into every single algorithm I create and I am projecting my agenda onto those algorithms.

We've learned our lesson with finance because they made a huge goddamn explosion that almost shut down the world. But the thing I realized is that there might never be an explosion on the scale of the financial crisis happening with big data.

With recidivism algorithms, for example, I worry about racist outcomes. With personality tests [for hiring], I worry about filtering out people with mental health problems from jobs. And with a teacher value-added model algorithm [used in New York City to score teachers], I worry literally that it's not meaningful. That it's almost a random number generator.

Especially from my experience as a quant in a hedge fund - I naively went in there thinking that I would be making the market more efficient and then was like, oh my God, I'm part of this terrible system that is blowing up the world's economy, and I don't want to be a part of that.

My fantasy is that there is a new regulatory body that is in charge of algorithmic auditing.