We must all learn more about the algorithms that shape our daily lives

IT IS hard to go a single day without hearing about the two huge crises that humanity is grappling with right now, the covid-19 pandemic and the climate emergency. In both cases, science and technology have been crucial in identifying the problems and their possible solutions.

Those two issues might seem like quite enough to be going on with, but we shouldn’t take our eyes off another troublesome area in which the role of science is vital: the rise of algorithms.

We might hear less about them, but algorithms are just as hard to avoid as talk of the pandemic. …