https://medium.com/@marekkowal/why-you-should-care-about-the-rising-economy-of-algorithms-cb33959acfe0

Marek KowalkiewiczBlockedUnblockFollowFollowingJan 14In 2016, a Reddit user made a confession. FiletOfFish1066 had automated all of the work tasks and spent around six years “doing nothing”. While the original post seems to have disappeared from Reddit, there are numerous reports about the admission. The original poster suggested that he (all the stories refer to FiletOfFish1066 as male) spent about 50 hours doing “real work”. The rest — “nothing”. When his employer found out, FiletOfFish1066 was fired. I think this is the worst mistake an employer can make. He should have been given a pay rise. But that’s a topic for another article. Let’s talk about hiring algorithms to work for you — just like FiletOfFish1066 had a bunch of algorithms working for him.

Algorithms don’t simply power applications, scripts, or automate tasks in other ways. Increasingly, they become our personal agents and make decisions on our behalf. For instance, Boston-based Quantopian, an investment firm focussed on crowdsourcing, allows people to submit simple algorithms that then make fund allocation decisions on behalf of investors. The algorithms are not yet as simple as Siri Shortcuts, but even beginner programmers should be able to write simple Quantopian algorithms. Imagine hundreds or thousands of such algorithms, each of them having access to information provided by quantopian, deciding what to do with their creators’ money. It is not science fiction; it is happening right now. An army of algorithms is continuously deciding how to allocate the funds.