Mechanically, we're already there: driverless cars, Siri, Facebook ad-targeting algorithms that can pick at your most private insecurities.
It is important that he acknowledged the importance of a modern industrial policy, but while the planned Alan Turing Centre on big data and algorithms and the proposed doctoral centres on grapheme and cell therapy are welcome, they hardly constitute its spearhead.
But to most web users, unfamiliar with encryption algorithms and open-source code, these precautions will seem extreme.
Mail could be encrypted – using public keys in a web of trust – within users' own computers, in their browsers; email at rest at Gmail could be encrypted using algorithms to which the user, rather than Google, has the relevant keys.
Playlists have become very important to Spotify: they're front and centre on the service, including its new "Now" screen – which is based not just on algorithms to understand where you are and what you're doing, but on the entirely human compiling of thousands of themed playlists by Spotify's in-house team.
One of the key battlegrounds between these two companies will be who has the best curators, but also who has the best algorithms for matching those playlists to listeners.
It could do more address the dilution of the external examiner system, the national variation in degree classification algorithms and the relationship between the management of resources and quality.
And don't forget that the gaping holes in your data will set red flags waving across a host of algorithms every time you do pop up on the grid.
The right algorithms can crunch this information into almost any context, from credit scores to health and motor insurance premiums; from indexes of employability and influence to net worth.
Google's search algorithms can make stuff seem more current or valid or relevant than it is.
Machine learning uses specialised mathematics, or algorithms, to sift and simplify the myriads of numbers.
