I feel like this is hugely glamourising the rote business of extracting value from data. I liked the story and did feel that it covered well the human aspect,

I feel like this is hugely glamourising the rote business of extracting value from data. I liked the story and did feel that it covered well the human aspect, but it was vastly more sympathetic towards our, uh, “digital children” than i think is really warranted. The algorithms will do surprising things, partly because the world is surprising, but mostly as long as that is sufficiently valuable. Otherwise they’ll get replaced by the next person with a jupityr notebook who can optimise better for $objective_function. Or maybe they have enough political control to redefine the objective. The outputs of these things are superficially mysterious but for all practical purposes are dictated by the values of the people who create them. It’s not legal to lobotomise your child but that’s exactly what will happen to any “algorithm” which hurts the bottom line.