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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.