The trajectory of books about new technologies follows a similar pattern: first, hype; then, backlash; then, finally, a more considered view of what it might actually be good for. The first hype books about algorithms appeared around 2012. Last year, sanity began to prevail with Cathy O'Neil's Weapons of Math Destruction. And now we have Hannah Fry's Hello World: Being Human in the Age of Algorithms, which seeks to find a sensible path somewhere between tossing algorithms at everything and running them over with a self-driving car. Fry, a professor in the mathematics of cities at University College London, accepts O'Neil's and others' arguments that algorithms make mistakes and that black-box scoring systems can be unfair.