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Algorithmic Harm with Professor Cass Sunstein - At the Money
un 5, 2025 At the Money
What is the impact of “ Algorithms” on the prices you pay for your Uber, what gets fed to you on TikTok, even the prices you pay in the supermarket?
Cass Sunstein, professor at Harvard Law School co-author of the new book, “Algorithmic Harm: Protecting People in the Age of Artificial Intelligence” Previously he co-authored “Nudge” with Nobel Laureate Dick Thaler. We discuss whether all this algorithmic impact is helping or harming people.
Each week, “At the Money” discusses an important topic in money management. From portfolio construction to taxes and cutting down on fees, join Barry Ritholtz to learn the best ways to put your money to work.
What is the impact of “ Algorithms” on the prices you pay for your Uber, what gets fed to you on TikTok, even the prices you pay in the supermarket?
Cass Sunstein, professor at Harvard Law School co-author of the new book, “Algorithmic Harm: Protecting People in the Age of Artificial Intelligence” Previously he co-authored “Nudge” with Nobel Laureate Dick Thaler. We discuss whether all this algorithmic impact is helping or harming people.
Each week, “At the Money” discusses an important topic in money management. From portfolio construction to taxes and cutting down on fees, join Barry Ritholtz to learn the best ways to put your money to work.
Ritholtz has a transcript on his blog. Key excerpt about the lack of shared experiences or knowledge:
Cass Sunstein: About 15, 20 years ago, there was a lot of concern that through individual choices, people would create echo chambers in which they would live. That’s a fair concern and it has created a number of let’s say challenges for self-government and learning.
What you’re pointing to is also emphasized in the book, which is that algorithms can echo chamber, you. An algorithm might say, “you’re keenly interested in immigration and you have this point of view, so boy are we gonna funnel to you lots of information.” Cause clicks are money and you’re gonna be clicking, clicking, clicking, click kicking.
And that might be a very good thing from the standpoint of the seller, so to speak, or the user of the algorithm. But from the standpoint of view, it’s not so fantastic. And from the standpoint of our society, it’s less than not so fantastic because people will be living in algorithm driven universes that are very separate from one another, and they can end up not liking each other very much.
Barry Ritholtz: Even worse than not liking each other, their view of the world aren’t based on the same facts or the same reality. Everybody knows about Facebook and to a lesser degree, TikTok and Instagram and how it very much balkanized people into things. We’ve seen that in, in the world of media. You have Fox News over here and MSNBC over there.
What you’re pointing to is also emphasized in the book, which is that algorithms can echo chamber, you. An algorithm might say, “you’re keenly interested in immigration and you have this point of view, so boy are we gonna funnel to you lots of information.” Cause clicks are money and you’re gonna be clicking, clicking, clicking, click kicking.
And that might be a very good thing from the standpoint of the seller, so to speak, or the user of the algorithm. But from the standpoint of view, it’s not so fantastic. And from the standpoint of our society, it’s less than not so fantastic because people will be living in algorithm driven universes that are very separate from one another, and they can end up not liking each other very much.
Barry Ritholtz: Even worse than not liking each other, their view of the world aren’t based on the same facts or the same reality. Everybody knows about Facebook and to a lesser degree, TikTok and Instagram and how it very much balkanized people into things. We’ve seen that in, in the world of media. You have Fox News over here and MSNBC over there.