Outnumbered: From Facebook and Google to Fake News and Filter-bubbles - The Algorithms That Control Our Lives

by David Sumpter

Overview

Outnumbered is a journey to the dark side of mathematics, from how it dictates our social media activities to our travel routes. Algorithms are running our society, and as Facebook's Cambridge Analytica scandal has revealed, we don't even realize how our data has been used against us. David Sumpter investigates whether mathematics is crossing dangerous lines when it comes to what we can make decisions about.

Our increasing reliance on technology and the internet has opened a window for mathematicians and data researchers to gaze through into our lives. Using the data they are constantly collecting about where we travel, where we shop, what we buy, and what interests us, they can begin to predict our daily habits, and increasingly we are relinquishing our decision-making to algorithms. Are we giving this up too easily?
Without understanding what mathematics can and can't do it is impossible to get a handle on how it is changing our lives.

In this book, David Sumpter takes an algorithm-strewn journey to the dark side of mathematics. He investigates the equations that analyze us, influence us and will (maybe) become like us, answering questions like:

Who are Cambridge Analytica, and what are they doing with our data?
How does Facebook build a 100-dimensional picture of your personality?
Are Google algorithms racist and sexist?
Why do election predictions fail so drastically?
Are algorithms that are designed to find criminals making terrible mistakes?
What does the future hold as we relinquish our decision-making to machines?

Featuring interviews with those working at the cutting edge of algorithm, Outnumbered explains how mathematics and statistics work in the real world, and what we should and shouldn't worry about.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781472947413
Publisher:	Bloomsbury USA
Publication date:	06/19/2018
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

David Sumpter is Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Uppsala, Sweden. Originally from London, but growing up in Scotland, he completed his doctorate in Mathematics at Manchester, and held a Royal Society Fellowship at Oxford before heading to Sweden. His scientific research covers everything from the inner workings of fish schools and ant colonies, the analysis the passing networks of football teams, segregation in society to machine learning and artificial intelligence.

David has written for The Economist, The Telegraph, Current Biology, Mathematics Today and FourFourTwo magazine, amongst others. He has been awarded the IMA's Catherine Richards prize for communicating mathematics to a wider audience. David's first book was Soccermatics: Mathematical Adventures in the Beautiful Game.

Table of Contents

1. Where are we going?
2. People Who Agree With You also Think That…
3. Let's Make Lots of Money
4. The Scary Green Wrinkle effect
5. Bad Climate
6. The Self-fulfilling Fallacy
7. Crime Numbers
8. We Need to Know Everything About You
9. The Social Observatory
10. The Do No Evil Brain
11. Out of Our Minds
12. Back to Reality

Editorial Reviews

04/30/2018
At a time of widespread concern about technology exerting too much influence over people’s lives, mathematics professor Sumpter (Soccermatics) devotes this enlightening book to investigating these fears and explaining clearly what algorithms do. He tackles different examples of their appearance in daily life, starting with in-the-news attempts to use the internet to study and influence voters. He discusses data harvested from Facebook users regarding their preferences in politics and other areas (theoretically, Democrats “could focus on getting the vote out among Harry Potter fans”), observing that, thankfully, the data’s accuracy is limited by the algorithim designers’ own inherent biases. As to the fake news disseminated on Facebook and other content aggregators, Sumpter believes that, for most people, it has little real impact. A more worrying phenomenon, he believes, is how advertising algorithms lead consumers. By reading, buying, or watching what is suggested to them, readers miss out on things that don’t fit into the math, since “when we are shown too much information, our brains decide that the best thing to do is just ignore it.” In his clear account of how algorithms work, Sumpter provides comfort to those who fear them as an insidious form of mind control, concluding that the real work is to address human biases. (June)

Publishers Weekly

"Ingenious . . . a deliciously insightful, mildly skeptical analysis of internet data manipulation." - Kirkus

"An enlightening book." - Publishers Weekly

"As millions slowly wake up to the pitfalls of handing over their digital lives, Sumpter combines engaging hands-on demonstrations with stories from insiders to shed light on precisely how data alchemists seek to persuade and predict us, and whether their almighty algorithms are all they're hyped up to be." - John Burn-Murdoch, data journalist, Financial Times

"You've heard about these algorithms that run your life and you want to know two things: how exactly do they work? And how much should I worry? With a refreshing mix of in-depth knowledge and personal honesty, David Sumpter answers both those questions." - Timandra Harkness, writer, comedian and broadcaster, and author of Big Data

"A stellar book about the application of mathematics to the real world. Each chapter tells a fascinating story, and David's warm and witty style demonstrates that a mathematician can be so much more than just a machine for turning coffee into theorems. A riveting read." - Kit Yates, Senior Lecturer, Department of Mathematical Sciences, University of Bath

From the Publisher

2018-05-01
Further frighteningly convincing research about the data infiltrating our lives.Experts regularly warn us that today's digital technology can extract our innermost secrets. In this ingenious addition to the genre, Sumpter (Applied Mathematics/Univ. of Uppsala, Sweden; Soccermatics: Mathematical Adventures in the Beautiful Game, 2016, etc.) agrees that there is some truth in this assessment but also serious limitations. The book, less a polemic than a combination of investigative journalism and (mostly) painless mathematical lessons, explains how social media, search engines, and merchants extract our opinions and manipulate them with a set of rules called an algorithm, which can often reveal our tastes, personality, and politics. Readers comfortable with ads tailored to previous purchases may flinch to learn that every mouse click such as a "like" under a photo, joke, or film clip enters a massive digital archive that reveals an unnervingly accurate portrait of the clicker. "Unlike our friends—who tend to forget the details and are forgiving in the conclusions they draw about us—Facebook is systematically collecting, processing and analyzing our emotional state," writes the author. "It is rotating our personalities in hundreds of dimensions, so it can find the most cold, rational direction to view us from." Persuading us to buy stuff seems benign, but the internet also teems with fake news scientifically designed to influence our votes. Sumpter returns repeatedly to the surprise victories of Donald Trump and Brexit. Wielding his mathematical tools, the author explains how algorithms deal with big data, and it turns out there is less there than meets the eye. Polls only calculate the odds of an event; they can't "predict" anything. True believers lap up fake news, but it has a barely detectable effect on changing the average reader's mind.Americans readers should look past the Britishness of the text to find a deliciously insightful, mildly skeptical analysis of internet data manipulation.

Kirkus Reviews