The Age of the Algorithm

In 1998, the recording industry was thriving. But the company pressing more compact discs than anyone else in America wasn't a record label…it was an internet company: America Online. The AOL Disc was a marketing coup—hugely successful. It’s not an overstatement to say that it’s ... Show More

Esperanto is what linguists call a “constructed language.” It isn’t attached to a nation or a region, and it didn’t evolve from another language over time. Instead, nearly 150 years ago, someone decided to sit down and design the whole thing from scratch. That someone was L. L. Z ... Show More

In 1932, the Women's House of Detention—New York City's first women's prison—opened in the heart of Greenwich Village. It was opened to make "wayward" women quiet, private, and properly feminine. And the building had one unique feature originally meant to be a sort of kindness—a ... Show More

Hidden from view, complex to understand and often controversial, algorithms are at the heart of computer coding that underpins modern society. Every time we search the internet, every time we pay by credit card, even the romantic partners suggested to us by online dating sites – ... Show More

Can algorithms help writers think more clearly and create innovative work ? On this week's 'Algorithm Verb' Ian McMillan is joined by Helen Arney, who performs a brand new love-song (written for the programme) using search engine algorithms, by Eugenia Cheng, a mathematician and ... Show More

Artificial intelligence is letting us make predictive algorithms that translate languages and spot diseases as well or better than humans. But these systems are also being used to make decisions about hiring and criminal sentencing. Do computers trained on vast datasets of human ... Show More

An algorithm told them what to do. They did it. Someone's life was destroyed.We trust algorithms every day without thinking twice. They tell us what to watch, what to buy, where to drive, who to date. But what happens when we hand them something far more dangerous than our attent ... Show More

OK, not exactly a computer — more like, the wild array of technologies that inform what we consume on our computers and phones. Because on this episode, we're looking at how AI and race bias intersect. Safiya Noble, a professor at UCLA and the author of the book Algorithms of Opp ... Show More

Netflix recommendations, Amazon suggestions, Google searches, airline ticket prices, your social media feed. All of these things are driven by algorithms—computer models that crunch massive amounts of data to generate useful results. These types of online algorithms are commonpla ... Show More

The future economy won't be built by people and factories, but by algorithms and artificial intelligence, says data scientist Mainak Mazumdar. But what happens when these algorithms get trained on biased data? Drawing on examples from Shanghai to New York City, Mazumdar shows how ... Show More

The word algorithm pops up a lot in tech discussions, but what the heck is an algorithm? From learning about an Arabic genius to discovering a way to figure out what day of the week falls on any given date, we look at algorithms.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information ... Show More

Computers are ranking the way people look—and the results are influencing the things we do, the posts we see, and the way we think. Ideas about what constitutes “beauty” are complex, subjective, and by no means limited to physical appearances. Elusive though it is, everyone wants ... Show More