Sarmishta Neogy, a fitness enthusiast from Delhi, uses the HealthifyMe app to log and track her calorie intake. Neogy recently upgraded from the company's free service to a paid tier, which gives her access to an artificial intelligence (AI)-based assistant called Ria. However, Neogy says she still uses the app mostly for their recipes, tips and to document food. She found the AI's tips generic and not very helpful. "The Ria service is very basic, so I don't know if I will benefit from it. For instance, if you ask Ria what is missing from my diet, it will tell you what is missing but nothing more," she added.

Spotify is doing everything it can to get you to listen to more music. The company has created algorithms to govern everything from your personal best home screen to curated playlists like Discover Weekly, and continues to experiment with new ways to understand music, and why people listen to one song or genre over another. While competitors like Apple Music, Amazon Prime Music, and Google Music rely on a mix of paid humans and community-created playlists, Spotify's main differentiating factor is the level of customization and expansion of music knowledge offered to customers. Spotify needs to continue building out these algorithms because it's the only way to create custom listening experiences for each of its over 200 million users. As Spotify struggles to grow its business, that differentiating factor needs to be a compelling reason to subscribe to the service.

The end of a politician's time in office often inspires a turn toward the existential, but few causes are as quixotic as the one chosen by James Vacca, who this month hits his three-term limit as a New York City Council member, representing the East Bronx. Vacca's nearly four decades in local government could well be defined by a bill that he introduced in August, and that passed last Monday by a unanimous vote. Once signed into law by Mayor Bill de Blasio, the legislation will establish a task force to examine the city's "automated decision systems"--the computerized algorithms that guide the allocation of everything from police officers and firehouses to public housing and food stamps--with an eye toward making them fairer and more open to scrutiny. In mid-October, I and some of my colleagues from a group at Cornell Tech that works on algorithmic accountability attended a hearing of the Council's technology committee to offer testimony on the bill. As Vacca, who chairs the committee, declared at the time, "If we're going to be governed by machines and algorithms and data, well, they better be transparent."