The great question of the 21st century: Whose black box do you trust?

The role of technology-fueled algorithms in shaping our society, and how to use them responsibly, is one of the topics I'll be exploring at the Next:Economy Summit in San Francisco, October 10-11. Some years ago, John Mattison, the chief medical information officer of Kaiser Permanente, the large integrated health provider, said to me, "The great question of the 21st century is going to be'Whose black box do you trust?'" Mattison was talking about the growing importance of algorithms in medicine, but his point, more broadly, was that we increasingly place our trust in systems whose methods for making decisions we do not understand. A lot of attention has been paid to the role of algorithms in shaping the experience of consumers. Much less attention has been paid to the role of algorithms in shaping the incentives for business decision-making. For example, there has been hand-wringing for years about how algorithms shape the news we see from Google or Facebook.