It was a version of a talk that Kearns had given before. But he couldn't ignore the irony of discussing the dangers inherent in new technologies in this particular place. The Santa Fe Institute is just 40 miles from the town of Los Alamos, site of the Manhattan Project, where more than 6,000 scientists and support staff worked together from 1939 to 1945 to produce the world's first atomic bomb. The ultimate impact of the project was enormous: Some 200,000 lives lost at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the unleashing of a new technological threat that has loomed over humankind for more than seven decades since. Looking back at those physicists involved in the Manhattan Project and their response to the social and ethical challenges their work presented offers a valuable precedent.

A woman's job application is rejected because of a recruiting algorithm that favors men's résumés. A girl dies by suicide after graphic images of self-harm are pushed up on her feed by social media algorithms. A black teen steals something and gets rated high-risk for committing future crime by an algorithm used in courtroom sentencing, while a white man steals something of similar value and gets rated low-risk. In recent years, advances in computer science have yielded algorithms so powerful that their creators have presented them as tools that can help us make decisions more efficiently and impartially. But the idea that algorithms are unbiased is a fantasy; in fact, they still end up reflecting human biases.