Evidence of harm is hard to come by.

I think what's happened is that the general public has become much more aware of the destructive power of Wall Street.

I wanted to prevent people from giving them too much power. I see that as a pattern. I wanted that to come to an end as soon as possible.

When people are not given an option by some secret scoring system, it's very hard to complain, so they often don't even know that they've been victimized.

The Facebook algorithm designers chose to let us see what our friends are talking about. They chose to show us, in some sense, more of the same. And that is the design decision that they could have decided differently. They could have said, "We're going to show you stuff that you've probably never seen before." I think they probably optimized their algorithm to make the most amount of money, and that probably meant showing people stuff that they already sort of agreed with, or were more likely to agree with.

Obviously the more transparency we have as auditors, the more we can get, but the main goal is to understand important characteristics about a black box algorithm without necessarily having to understand every single granular detail of the algorithm.

The training one receives when one becomes a technician, like a data scientist - we get trained in mathematics or computer science or statistics - is entirely separated from a discussion of ethics.