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.

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 can't just throw something out there and assume it works just because it has math in it.

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.

The NSA buys data from private companies, so the private companies are the source of all this stuff.

Evidence of harm is hard to come by.

When I think about whether I want to take a job, I don't just think about whether it's technically interesting, although I do consider that. I also consider the question of whether it's good for the world.