Algorithms Shaping Our Economic Decisions

Your entire personality is just a data point on a giant invisible graph. That is how machine

learning actually controls the economy. When a bank approves your loan, it’s not a person

deciding, it’s a Decision Tree algorithm filtering out the risk. When you see a targeted

ad, that’s k-Nearest Neighbors finding other people who act exactly like

you. It comes down to two things. Supervised learning predicts the future,

like housing prices, while unsupervised learning finds hidden patterns, like spotting credit

card fraud. Algorithms know what you want to buy before you do, just by measuring

the distance between you and the next guy.