1. Hello World: How To Be Human In The Age Of The Machine Pdf Format

Hello World: How to be Human in the Age of the Machine Book of the Week Mathematician and broadcaster Dr Hannah Fry uncovers the hidden algorithms behind almost every aspect of our modern lives. Yet a human can look you in the eye before passing sentence. This is the age of the algorithm, the story of a not-too-distant future where machines rule supreme, making important decisions – in healthcare, transport, finance, security, what people watch, where they go - even who is sent to prison.

The literary breakthrough of the 21st century will come when someone finds a way to write the word “data” without making 83 per cent of readers instantly disengage their brains. This really, really matters. Each smartphone user has an invisible ledger floating over their head that quietly takes note of where they go, who they talk to, what they say and how much they splurge on Italian sausages or hydrangeas.These digital books of life are pulped together in vast containers of information — often after being traded by the million through shadowy companies known as data brokers — and analysed to extract subtle patterns in the way people think, act and spend their money. The resulting insights are then served back to us in the form of political advertisements, recommendations for rom-coms and pre-crime policing.Ah, the data industry says, but this whole process is strictly anonymous.

Well, sort of. Last year a pair of technology experts set up a fake data broker and used it to acquire the browser histories of three million Germans.

Getting hold of their names was frighteningly easy. And once they had the names, they had everything.They could see, for example, that during eight minutes in August 2016 a German judge with a pregnant partner visited more than a dozen pornography sites between searches for baby names and strollers. They even knew what turned him on (“povwifeyonsexstoolwithbeadedthong” was one of the few printable links in his file).This stuff is real. It warps our lives on a daily basis and leaves us horribly exposed to manipulation.

Hello World: How To Be Human In The Age Of The Machine Pdf Format

Yet it is also an abstract sphere of atrocious jargon and very large numbers. There is a huge gap in the market for a book that can make us see how we are each unwittingly snared in this web of impenetrable statistics. What Tolstoy did for an era of transcontinental wars, and what Dickens and Zola did for the Industrial Revolution, somebody badly needs to do for the age of the algorithm.Hannah Fry, a mathematician who models our mass behaviour in cities, has not written that book. What she has produced is a stylish, thoughtful and scrupulously fair-minded account of what the software that increasingly governs our world can and cannot do.The driverless car is an almost magically brilliant piece of technology. In just over a decade we have worked out how to combine sophisticated machine learning programs with cameras, radar and lidar, radar’s visible-light counterpart, to make vehicles that read road signs, stop at pelican crossings and hardly ever kill anyone.As Fry points out, though, the cars are trained on carefully defined and largely predictable areas. Their visual systems can be thrown into disarray by a single stray pixel.

Volvo’s machines are baffled by kangaroos. And the code in the cars is so neurotically safety-conscious that cyclists, pedestrians and aggressive human drivers can run rings around them. It is, in other words, highly unlikely that they will ever be much more than fancy, but limited taxis. “The vision we’ve come to believe in,” Fry writes, “is like a trick of the light: a mirage that promises a luxurious private chauffeur for all of us but, close up, is actually just a local minibus.”The best chapters in Hello World deal with crime and justice. Algorithms are already pervasive in policing.

The Kent force uses a package called PredPol, which can forecast where in the county crime is likely and so direct its patrols. Durham constabulary has a piece of artificial intelligence that can calculate the risk that suspects will reoffend.Most of this software is still deeply flawed. Facial recognition, which is being tested in Berlin and forms one of the foundations of China’s totalitarian security state, has struggled to live up to its evangelical billing. Apple’s Face ID system, which ostensibly has a one-in-a-million error rate, can easily be duped into unlocking iPhones by siblings or people with 3D-printed masks.

One ten-year-old boy was mistaken for his mother. Another facial recognition program thought a man in a pair of spotty glasses was the actress Milla Jovovich.On the whole, though, the algorithms do a much better job than any human. Dodgy identifications by witnesses play a role in more than 70 per cent of wrongful convictions in the US. In one airport security-style experiment, professional face recognisers failed to spot people carrying someone else’s ID 14 per cent of the time.Judges are riddled with a particularly terrifying number of biases. Those with daughters are more likely to go easy on women defendants. American judges are less likely to grant bail if their local sports team lost in the past week. Even getting judges to cast a die before reviewing a case can influence their sentencing decisions.Should we replace them with robots?

Or should we turn them into jurisprudential cyborgs, with their every verdict informed by a panel of algorithms? For each problem that you solve with AI, you will end up creating a new one in its place. There is always a trade-off.

Often these bargains will be worth striking, but as with any bargain, it is best to make them in the full knowledge of what you are getting yourself into. “This is the future I’m hoping for,” Fry writes in her coda. “One where we stop seeing machines as objective masters and start treating them as we would any other sources of power.”Probably the most annoying thing a critic can do to a writer is to chastise them for leaving things out. Of course they do.

That’s what writing is. All the same, this book is scarcely 200 pages long, and I would very much have liked to read more of Fry’s insights into the way algorithms work in politics, advertising and social media. In the last chapter she writes that she has “come across all manner of snake-oil salesmen willing to trade on myths and profit from our gullibility”. Where are they?

CompuHost Karaoke Hosting Solution V3 has been developed from the ground up with the discriminating Karaoke Hosting Professional in mind! Tens of thousands of professional Karaoke Hosts from all over the world are enjoying the industry leading list of features and unsurpassed functionality CompuHost V3 continues to offer, ensuring their shows are the very BEST around! Download karoake orignal bart. Find images of Karaoke. Free for commercial use No attribution required High quality images. Karaoke Version provides karaoke songs, instrumental songs, practice tracks and backing track downloads. We have over 52,000 professional quality accompaniment tracks and Karaoke Video, and we add new instrumental music versions and features every day. Mar 20, 2019  Collection of my Karaoke songs, I created from some older MP3 + CDG files that I had lying around. I am a huge fan of the open source Kodi (former XBMC) media. Karaoke Albums by BKD Karaoke Studio. Buy the album downloads of your favorite artist or genre. Buy the new album or single tracks.

What does the pustulous underbelly of the trade in human souls actually look like?Still, Hello World ranks alongside Timandra Harkness’s Big Data and Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction as one of the best books yet written on data and algorithms. Fry insists that she is not a natural author. As Thomas Mann said, a writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. All that hard labour behind the scenes has resulted in a beautifully accessible guide to the fabric of modern life that leaps lightly from one story to the next without sparing the reader some hard questions. And anyone who can explain random forest plots and Bayesian statistics through the mediums of Lady Gaga and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Deserves a place in the bestseller charts.

‘I don’t like the look of your book,’ my housemate says. ‘I think reading it will scare me.’I can understand why. Even just reading the blurb of Hello World serves as a reminder of just of how much of our daily experiences are already and increasingly will be influenced by algorithms, a fact that sits uneasily with most people.

A lot of what we hear about machine learning in the media focuses on its potential to manipulate us. Recent news reports of intrusive political campaign tactics, for example, have seen algorithms discussed in the same breath as conspiracy theories. And there’s a sense of helplessness in much of the coverage implying the inevitable take-over of corrupt corporate giants, or worse – cold, inhuman AIs.In this book, however, mathematician Hannah Fry takes a step back, encouraging the reader to remember that algorithms don’t claim to be all-knowing, they just provide their best guess to the problems we’ve set them.Fry examines topical decision-making algorithms under seven themed chapters: power, data, justice, medicine, cars, crime and art. Like a knowledgeable friend giving an honest explanation in a conversation over dinner, Fry tells stories about the things that have gone wrong, but remains optimistic, explaining what happened, why the algorithm was implemented in the first place, and reminding us what the alternatives are.For example, in the chapter on justice, Fry describes how she was initially against the idea of using algorithms in a court room. However, she highlights the massive inconsistencies in the sentences handed down by human judges and tells us about an algorithm built to predict the risk of re-offense with pretty good accuracy. Both approaches throw up some pretty nasty errors, but perhaps using both to complement each other might not be such a bad idea.Using reported, relatable real-life examples to illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of each algorithm, Hello World is a page-turner: each new chapter feels like a new conversation, and always one I want to be included in. I am completely won over by Fry’s mantra that pushing for transparency in who is writing these algorithms and for what purpose, is key to maintaining control of an evolving machine-driven society.

She suggests that instead of writing the algorithm to give us a single answer, let’s tell it to show us its working and its top shortlist. Let’s force ourselves to remember exactly what we are working with, not give these lines of code unwanted supreme power, and let their strengths complement ours for a world we want to say hello to.To my housemate, I reply: ‘Read it. I think you’ll love it. The robots won’t do you any harm if you know how to teach them not to.’.