"The cold science of computation seems to declare that social progress is over—there can only be technological progress. Yet if we manage to wrest control of technology from Silicon Valley and the Ivory Tower, the possibilities for postcapitalist society are seemingly endless. "

Not sure how I feel about it yet. ... Machine learning is on the websites you visit, the device in your pocket, and next year’s smart kitchen appliances. It’s being used to judge your creditworthiness, set your bail, and decide whether to stop and frisk you on the street. Written informally in English, these tasks already sound like optimization problems; mathematically, they can indeed be expressed using variables, constraints, and objective functions, then solved using optimization software. ... By this time, I had plucked up the courage to raise my hand. “Isn’t it a bit insane,” I asked, “that we’re sitting here debating at what level of granularity to visualize this data? Is this a technical problem that can be optimized to find some happy balance, or is it a political question of whether elections should be run this way, with campaign contributions, in the first place?” I looked to my peers, but there was no response. The instructor then said, “I think that’s a signal to move on to the next topic.”