Imagine a world in which everything about your life -- your friends, your family, which school you went to, your social media activity -- are reduced to a simple number used by police and the government to determine whether something bad will happen to you. It sounds crazy, and almost paranoid, but algorithm-based initiatives have aided police from Chicago to London to help guide public safety interventions. In the case of Robert McDaniel, he was assigned a score that put him on Chicago’s “Heat List,” and he was told that he was likely to be involved in a shooting. But police didn’t know whether he’d be the shooter or the victim. That resulted in the city offering him a range of services, but it also put him on the police’s radar -- and that began a chain of events that fulfilled a grim prophecy. The promise of advanced math utilizing increasingly sophisticated data collection grows stronger by the year… but so do its potential perils. Can quantifying a person’s behavior actually te