Carissa Véliz

If you have enough money, you can use it to influence public perception by heavily betting on something.

Politicians have bet on themselves.

In February this year, six anonymous accounts earned $1.2 million, betting for the attack on Iran.

Some of those wallets were funded hours before.

Finally, predictions create and then cover up injustice.

Algorithmic predictions are building this Kafkaesque world in which we can no longer contest decisions because they're not based on clearly defined criteria.

If I reject your loan application because you don't fulfill a particular requirement, that's a verifiable fact.

If I'm wrong, you can challenge me.

But if I reject your loan application on the basis of a prediction, there's no way you can contest that.

Predictions are never facts.

Facts belong to the past.

Predictions are unverifiable, unfalsifiable.

Since they are about the future, they cannot be challenged for being false, thereby creating the perfect recipe for hidden injustice.

Predictions are often unfair because they're not based on who people are, but on who we think they will become.

When we predict someone's future as if it was the weather, we're treating them with disrespect, too much as things and not enough as agents who have a say in that future, who can and should be allowed to defy their odds.

We're facing some pretty grim predictions from some of our most prominent prophets.

Larry Ellison, the chairman of a predictive software company appropriately named Oracle, has predicted a modern surveillance state in which citizens will be on their best behavior because we're being watched all the time.

But the illusion of a world without crime is a world filled with a very different kind of crime, authoritarianism.

Is that the world we want?

What can we do to not sleepwalk into it?