By construction, the world of big data is siloed and segmented and segregated so that successful people, like myself - technologists, well-educated white people, for the most part - benefit from big data, and it's the people on the other side of the economic spectrum, especially people of color, who suffer from it. They suffer from it individually, at different times, at different moments. They never get a clear explanation of what actually happened to them because all these scores are secret and sometimes they don't even know they're being scored.

So much of our society as a whole is gearing us to maximize our salary or bonus. Basically, we just think in terms of money. Or, if not money, then, if you're in academia, it's prestige. It's a different kind of currency. And there's this unmeasured dimension of all jobs, which is whether it's improving the world.

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

Every system using data separates humanity into winners and losers.

An insurance company might say, "Tell us more about yourself so your premiums can go down." When they say that, they're addressing the winners, not the losers.

That's what we do when we work in Silicon Valley tech startups: We think about who's going to benefit from this. That's almost the only thing we think about.

Google is so big you have no idea what a given person does.