Rich Reviews: Hello World by Hannah Fry

The algorithm made me do it.

Have you ever told Spotify you’re in a good mood and it replied with a Radiohead playlist or had your bank app block your card because you dared buy coffee in a new postcode?

Congratulations, you’ve already met the algorithms that Hannah Fry writes about in Hello World.

This isn’t another “AI will destroy humanity” panic piece. It’s smarter, funnier, and far more human.

Fry, a mathematician who actually understands storytelling, explores how algorithms quietly run the world, and how we quietly let them.

She covers everything from medicine and policing to finance, driving, dating, and art, with a dry humour that makes you laugh, wince, and question all the hype about AI, in fact it makes you realise the word “artificial” is doing most of the heavy lifting in the term.

Her big idea is this… Algorithms don’t just make decisions, they also make us stop questioning them.

The manual’s missing, but the system’s live.

The book takes us on a tour of how algorithms now shape every part of life.

• Hospitals use AI to spot cancers faster than doctors, until the system fails because it was trained on scans taken in better lighting.
• Judges rely on predictive models to decide who gets bail, even though no one can explain how those models work.
• Traders automate markets, then watch algorithms spiral into chaos reacting to each other, tanking billions in minutes.

Even in art and dating, it’s the same farce.

Algorithms don’t create anything they just release a remix. They don’t understand beauty or chemistry, they just recognise patterns and fake it convincingly.

It’s like watching a tribute band absolutely nail one of your favourite tunes but it’s just not the real band and somehow misses the emotion entirely.

We’ve built a world that assumes anything wrapped in maths must be right. The more complex the code, the less anyone dares to challenge it.

Accountability doesn’t die dramatically, it just quietly slips out the back door and I personally cant help but wonder if this is half the attraction, it takes the responsibility of decision making off you!

The ethics of running people over, now in code.

Self-driving cars are where things get truly philosophical.

If a crash is unavoidable, who should the car save?

• the passenger
• the pedestrian
• the child
• or the pensioner?

It’s the classic trolley problem, only now it’s being coded by a developer who’s two sprints behind.

Humans make decisions using emotion, instinct, and experience.

We sense that a cyclist is wobbly, that a child might run into the road chasing a ball near a park or that something just feels off.

Algorithms don’t do that.

They see everything, but understand nothing. They calculate, but they don’t care.

At some point, we might accept that ignorance is fine, as long as the results are good. That’s when it gets dangerous. Once we stop demanding to understand how the algorithm got it right, we’ve officially moved from progress to blind faith. It reminds me of the classic Starwars quote but with humanity being Obie Wan and AI being Darth Vader

When I left you, I was but the learner; now I am the master

Algorithms that get an A+, but never show their homework.

Remember at school when you took a maths exam the teacher would always remind you to show your workings as you’d get some marks for following the right path even if the end result was t quite right?

Algorithms skip that bit. They hand in their answers, hide their logic behind “proprietary technology,” and call it innovation.

Fry’s message hits hard here by calling out we’ve built systems that even their creators can’t fully explain, and we’ve decided that’s fine because they seem to work.

But when things go wrong, there’s no one left to blame except “the system.”

That’s not progress, that’s outsourcing responsibility. It’s like hiring a babysitter who refuses to tell you where your kids are, but assures you they’re “in a reasonably safe location.”

Flawed, biased, emotional… and still winning.

For all our faults, humans are still better at decision-making than algorithms. Not because we’re smarter, but because we’re adaptable. We are designed to learn, we listen to our senses, and we adjust decisions in real time based on a multitude of subtle inputs.

Algorithms are brilliant at spotting patterns, but have absolutely zero context. They don’t grow from experience, they just process data and crucially data can only describe what has happened, not what might.

A human driver can read the road like a story – noticing the toddler on the kerb, the impatient driver in the mirror, the feeling that something is about to happen. Machines don’t have feelings. They just have probability tables.

Our flaws, biases, and gut instincts may be messy, but they’re also what keep us human.

PMs, meet your new stakeholder, the algorithm.

If you work in tech or product, Hello World should be compulsory reading. It’s basically a mirror with footnotes. It forces you to ask how many times you’ve prioritised speed, automation, or “innovation” without really asking whether anyone still understands what’s under the hood.

A few lessons stick:

• Automation without accountability is abdication. “The model made me do it” isn’t a strategy.
• Transparency is the new trust. Customers forgive human mistakes, not mysterious ones.
• If you can’t explain it, don’t deploy it. Black box might sound cool in a slide deck, but not in production.
• Sometimes slower is smarter. Keeping humans in the loop isn’t inefficiency, it’s intelligence.

Required reading for anyone who’s ever said “the data speaks for itself”

Hello World is funny in parts but also unsettling, and painfully relevant. Fry isn’t a scaremonger, she just points out how ridiculous it is that we trust machines more than we trust ourselves.

Her genius is in showing that the problem with algorithms isn’t that they’re getting smarter, it’s that we’re getting lazier.

Because the real danger isn’t AI taking over, it’s us handing over.

So next time you hear someone saying

The data speaks for itself

Remember, it really doesn’t it mumbles a bit, contradicts itself and occasionally just makes shit up, but we believe it anyway because it sounds confident and, well, it’s Artificial Intelligence, it’s smarter than us….Right?