As you saw in the opening vignette, computerized decision making has really taken off in recent years.

Some have blamed the financial crisis that began in 2007-2008 on ex cessive reliance on these
computerized decision-making models. Lending officers who used to make individualized decisions
about credit worthiness through personal judg ment were replaced by computerized and statistical
mod els, which resulted in mechanistic decision making. As a result , large numbers of decisions were
tied to a common set of assumptions, and when those assumptions proved to be wrong, the entire
credit system fell apart and the economy faltered.