Review: Automate This: How Algorithms Came to Rule Our World

Automate This: How Algorithms Came to Rule Our World by Christopher Steiner

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



This brisk read goes into a lot of detail on pioneer hacker Petterfy and how he innovated, at the oscilloscope and cut wire level, the "quants" role on Wall Street. This part of the book reminded me of the early computing age era whodunit [b:The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage|18154|The Cuckoo's Egg Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage|Clifford Stoll|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1385177918s/18154.jpg|19611]. Steiner follows the bouncing ball of algorithm-driven economic growth to the West Coast and Facebook, a fascinating account of what is being done to auto-analyze customer service calls, Google's driver-less cars, and a future of computer-filled Rx and other medical tasks.



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