Hannah Fry quotes

We should actively be thinking about what our inventions would look like if exploited by someone with a less of a moral compass and decide if the world would really be better off with them in it. (Hannah Fry)
All around us, algorithms provide a kind of convenient source of authority: an easy way to delegate responsibility, a short cut we take without thinking. View quote
Hannah Fry
The future doesn't just happen. We are building it, and we are building it all the time. View quote
Hannah Fry
Because for me, equations and symbols aren't just a thing. They're a voice that speaks out about the incredible richness of nature and the startling simplicity in the patterns that twist and turn and warp and evolve all around us, from how the world works to how we behave. View quote
Hannah Fry
In medicine, you learn about ethics from day one. In mathematics, it's a bolt-on at best. It has to be there from day one and at the forefront of your mind in every step you take. View quote
Hannah Fry
We're living in an age where new technology offers gigantic upsides - artificial intelligence has the potential to diagnose cancer, catch serial killers and reduce prison populations. View quote
Hannah Fry
I certainly think there are some skills we'll lose as we hand things over to automation. I can barely remember my own phone number now, let alone the long list of numbers I used to know, and my handwriting has completely gone to pot. View quote
Hannah Fry
There's barely any aspect of our modern lives that hasn't had a mathematical contribution at some point and yet, if you asked the average person, they might think that maths is just difficult, irrelevant and uninteresting. View quote
Hannah Fry
But for me, true art can't be created by accident. There are boundaries to the reach of algorithms. Limits to what can be quantified. Among all of the staggeringly impressive, mindboggling things that data and statistics can tell me, how it feels to be human isn't one of them. View quote
Hannah Fry
What seems obvious to one person wouldn't occur to another. Your perspective is hard coded into the work that you create. View quote
Hannah Fry
And anytime a programmer makes a decision about how to deal with data, how to average it or clean it, you're imparting more of your own bias on it. (Hannah Fry)
The invisible pieces of code that form the gears and cogs of the modern machine age, algorithms have given the world everything from social media feeds to search engines and satellite navigation to music recommendation systems. View quote
Hannah Fry
People are often quite lazy. We like taking the easy way out - we like handing over responsibility, we like being offered shortcuts that mean we don't have to think. View quote
Hannah Fry
One of the problems maths struggles with is that it's invisible. We haven't got explosions on our side. View quote
Hannah Fry
Everything we're doing online is being not just monitored, but that information is being packaged up and sold and resold to manipulate us. View quote
Hannah Fry
It's true that you can't take an individual rain droplet and say where it's come from or where it's going to end up. But you can say with pretty good certainty whether it will be cloudy tomorrow. View quote
Hannah Fry
You can harvest any data that you want, on anybody. You can infer any data that you like, and you can use it to manipulate them in any way that you choose. And you can roll out an algorithm that genuinely makes massive differences to people's lives, both good and bad, without any checks and balances. View quote
Hannah Fry
When it comes to love, making long-term decisions is a risky business. Sooner or later, most of us decide to leave our carefree bachelor or bachelorette days behind us and settle down. View quote
Hannah Fry
You can't assess the value of an innovation in isolation, you have to consider whose hands it's in. View quote
Hannah Fry
I spend quite a lot of time thinking about how curated our information is. What we watch, what we read, what we buy, often who we talk to, is all shaped and influenced by some kind of a mathematical algorithm. View quote
Hannah Fry
When you don't have diversity in the creative process, you inevitably end up with a single, narrow perspective in the output. (Hannah Fry)
I do think we're at a point in our history where almost all of the big, grand, challenges faced by the human race are those that demand a scientific solution: climate change; access to clean water; over-crowding; plastic waste. View quote
Hannah Fry
If we permit flawed machines to make life-changing decisions on our behalf - by allowing them to pinpoint a murder suspect, to diagnose a condition or take over the wheel of a car - we have to think carefully about what happens when things go wrong. View quote
Hannah Fry
Technology on its own isn't good or or evil. View quote
Hannah Fry
As the law catches up and the battle between corporate profits and social good plays out, we need to be careful not to be lulled into a false sense of privacy. View quote
Hannah Fry

Hannah Fry

Occupation: English Mathematician
Quotes count: 42