Not too long ago, the word algorithm was pretty obscure. According to a Google search, its occurrence (in books, at least) was essentially nil until around World War II (the very beginning of the computer era), when it started to creep up.1 A recent Google search for the word returned 150 million hits;2 a search for news stories containing the word returned well over 500,000 hits;3 Amazon offered over 30,000 books with the word in their titles.4
Some of these books suggest that all we need—rather than love—is algorithms, such as The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (Domingos 2015), The Advent of the Algorithm: The Idea that Rules the World (Berlinski 2000), and Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions (Christian and Griffiths 2016). Some of these books suggest that the combination of algorithms and big data5 means that science itself—the entire enterprise of investigation and discovery— is obsolete.