I am sure many people have wondered why I have been banging on about the ideology of algorithms for years. My insistence that “there is no such thing as a neutral algorithm may have appeared geekily nit-picky. But then naybe some of those people have children who are affected by the current A Level results fiasco?
Once upon a time, in a world of supposedly equal opportunity, it may have appeared not to matter what school you went to or what it’s previous students’ results had been. Even now there are lots of bits of data collected about you that in their current context may appear similarly innocuous.
But what if someone in the future decides that those bits of data mean something else? What if they combine those bits of data with other, similarly apparently innocuous data, and suddenly 2+2=5? What if this continues to happen for the rest of your life, increasing exponentially year on year?
What if it’s already too late to do anything about it?
The Obvious? 