You know less than you think you do - about what makes you healthy, what makes you rich, who you should date, where you should live. You know less than you think you do about how to raise your children, or, for that matter, whether you should have children in the first place. Seth Stephens-Davidowitz showed how big data is revolutionising the social sciences. He shows how big data can help us find answers to some of the most important questions we...

"A former Wall Street quantitative analyst sounds an alarm on mathematical modeling, a pervasive new force in society that threatens to undermine democracy and widen inequality,"--NoveList. "We live in the age of the algorithm. Increasingly, the decisions that affect our lives-- where we go to school, whether we get a car loan, how much we pay for health insurance--are being made not by humans, but by mathematical models. In theory, this should lead...

A new field of collective intelligence has emerged in the last few years, prompted by a wave of digital technologies that make it possible for organizations and societies to think at large scale. This "bigger mind"--human and machine capabilities working together--has the potential to solve the great challenges of our time. So why do smart technologies not automatically lead to smart results? Gathering insights from diverse fields, including philosophy,...

"Hilke Schellmann is an Emmy award-winning investigative reporter, Wall Street Journal and Guardian contributor, and journalism professor at NYU. In "The Algorithm," she investigates the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the world of work. AI is now being used to decide who has access to an education, who gets hired, who gets fired, and who receives a promotion. Drawing on exclusive information from whistleblowers, internal documents, and real-world...