Slaves to the algorithm

“The brands that do get into the home are the ones that will win.”

Andrew Burt, a chief privacy officer at data management platform provider Immuta, refers to them as the silent failures. That’s how the legal engineer by trade describes what he sees as the biggest issue facing a world where increasingly more people are reliant on the use of algorithms to make critical decisions. Asked earlier this year whether he believed algorithms could be trusted, Burt claimed that as people began to rely more on complex algorithms, their makers’ ability to explain their inner workings will get progressively harder.

This isn’t simply because these models are hard to interpret, rather because the networks they’re being connected to are becoming more convoluted.

While researchers have long documented the many occasions in which algorithms outperform humans – including beating doctors and pathologists in predicting the survival of cancer patients, occurrence of heart attacks and severity of diseases – every day the world of IT gets harder to manage. “We have more endpoints, more data, more databases and more storage technologies than ever before,” Burt says.

“I believe our biggest challenge lies in being able to understand the