Maciej Ceglowski:

The people who are most exposed to risk aren't the ones who would have to pay the bill. As the banking crisis of 2008 showed us, we treat sufficiently cataclysmic events as acts of God rather than failures of risk management. If enough people ignore a risk, they can successfully argue after the fact that no one could have foreseen it. Those who do prepare for diaster end up looking like chumps. Why act to mitigate a potential disaster when you know the rest of the country will bail you out?

Anil Dash:

We build systems that let us pass the buck to someone else, in exchange for passing them a few bucks. We could respond by stepping up and saying where we want to take responsibility.

Graham Allison:

Americans have a tendency to lecture others about why they should be "more like us." In urging China to follow the lead of the United States, should we Americans be careful what we wish for?

Since the financial crisis, nearly 40 percent of all growth in the global economy has occurred in just one country: China.

Adele Peters:

China is proposing to assess its citizens' behavior over a totality of commercial and social activities, creating an uber-scoring system. When completed, the model could encompass everything from a person's chat-room comments to their performance at work, while the score could be used to determine eligibility for jobs, mortgages, and social services.

Caitlin Dewey:

Imagine every interaction you've ever had suddenly open to the scrutiny of the Internet public.

John Eligon:

The strategy, known as predictive policing, combines elements of traditional policing, like increased attention to crime "hot spots" and close monitoring of recent parolees. But it often also uses other data, including information about friendships, social media activity and drug use, to identify "hot people" and aid the authorities in forecasting crime.

The use of computer models by local law enforcement agencies to forecast crime is part of a larger trend by governments and corporations that are increasingly turning to predictive analytics and data mining in looking at behaviors.