Report documents the views of 1.3K tech experts, scholars, businesspeople, and government leaders on the future of algorithms and their impact on society
Algorithms are instructions for solving a problem or completing a task. Recipes are algorithms, as are math equations. Computer code is algorithmic.
Context & Ripple Effects
Pew's 1,300-expert survey arrives one year after reporting on algorithmic scoring systems like FICO and China's Sesame Credit had already shown these tools edging toward social control — the survey is the field taking stock of its own trajectory. The expert panel's mix of technologists, scholars, and government leaders makes it an early map of where the governance debate would land.
First-order effects
- Platforms including Google, Facebook, and Twitter gain a reference document they can cite when defending algorithmic choices, while regulators get a baseline of expert consensus to test proposals against.
Second-order effects
- When legal challenges arrive, the survey feeds the argument later documented around Trump-era regulatory threats that algorithms may qualify for First Amendment protection, complicating any push for mandated disclosure.
Third-order effects
- As algorithms moved from recommendation into state functions like police patrols, prison sentencing, and probation rules, the accountability questions this survey framed became operational governance problems — a shift experts later argued even open-sourcing code cannot solve.
The trend: Algorithmic decision-making is migrating from consumer-facing recommendations into civic infrastructure, forcing governance debates that outpace transparency fixes.