In this week’s podcast, we speak Robert Elliott Smith, an expert in evolutionary algorithms and researcher of artificial intelligence.

His latest book, Rage Inside the Machine: The Prejudice of Algorithms, and How to Stop the Internet Making Bigots of Us All (£20, Bloomsbury), explores how the harmful effects of bigotry, greed, segregation and mass coercion are finding their way into the AI that runs our lives, without us even realising it.

He tells us how powerful algorithms have been manipulated to divide people, why algorithmic bias has a dark history in the field of eugenics, and what we can do to fight back against the insidious influences of social media.

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