This is a non-fiction book dealing with the third wave - the algorithm.
I just finished reading the book a few moments ago. Interestingly I could no longer find the exact page to quote what I remember as the highlight. Well, I will attempt to paraphrase what I absorbed. If you are using social media extensively and have purchased a lot of products from on-line sources over time, then there is an extensive file somewhere in the cyberspace documenting your profile base on your likes. Imagine if you have purchased the entire Harry Potter series and maybe also Sabrina the Teenage Witch, supposing Amazon was then recommending you to purchase Hunger Games as an e-book when it was "hot off the press". Based on your on-line history, the algorithm predicted that you are most likely to go for it, then it is likely that you may end up paying up to 4 times the absolute low price offered to another netizen who is most unlikely to purchase it upon initial offer.
In the US a poor woman had been made homeless through a program that replaced human social welfare officer, it followed that she lost her Medicaid benefits as well because the algorithm did not replicate the complex steps that a human decision maker normally goes through deciding who should be given what. It was after much hue and cry that the injustice was righted.
Perhaps I was being biased in quoting back to back two instances that the computer program run afoul of what we perceive to be right or just. Of course the algorithm is here to stay, permeating from one field to another like osmosis. Jobs are taken over, professions could be obsoleted overnight. After reading the book which the last chapter document what the algorithm has achieved in the arts - whether in paintings, plays, movies, TV series - probably a year or two ago, I begin to wonder if someday the profession of writing will be taken over by machines.
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