Armies of the finest minds in computer science have dedicated themselves to improving the odds of making a sale. The Internet-era abundance of data and clever software has opened the door to tailored marketing, targeted advertising and personalized product recommendations.

Shake your head if you like, but that’s no small thing. Just look at the technology-driven shake-up in the advertising, media and retail industries.

This automated decision-making is designed to take the human out of the equation, but it is an all-too-human impulse to want someone looking over the result spewed out of the computer. Many data quants see marketing as a low-risk — and, yes, lucrative — petri dish in which to hone the tools of an emerging science. “What happens if my algorithm is wrong? Someone sees the wrong ad,” said Claudia Perlich, a data scientist who works for an ad-targeting start-up. “What’s the harm? It’s not a false positive for breast cancer.”

But the stakes are rising as the methods and mind-set of data science spread across the economy and society. Big companies and start-ups are beginning to use the technology in decisions like medical diagnosis, crime prevention and loan approvals. The application of data science to such fields raises questions of when close human supervision of an algorithm’s results is needed.