We are living in algorithmic times.
From machine learning and artificial intelligence to blockchain or simpler news-feed filtering, automated systems can transform the social world in ways that are just starting to be imagined.
Redefining these emergent technologies as the new systems of knowing, pioneering scholar David Beer examines the acute tensions they create and how they are changing what is known and what is knowable. Drawing on cases ranging from the art market and the smart home through to financial tech, AI patents and neural networks, he develops key concepts for understanding the framing, envisioning and implementation of algorithms.
This book will be of interest to anyone who is concerned with the rise of algorithmic thinking and the way it permeates society.
EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence
As the US contends with issues of populism and de-democratization, this timely study considers the impacts of digital technologies on the country’s politics and society.
Timcke provides a Marxist analysis of the rise of digital media, social networks and technology giants like Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft. He looks at the impact of these new platforms and technologies on their users who have made them among the most valuable firms in the world.
Offering bold new thinking across data politics and digital and economic sociology, this is a powerful demonstration of how algorithms have come to shape everyday life and political legitimacy in the US and beyond.
Introduction Employers and recruiters make use of a number of automation technologies to screen job candidates. With advances in technology, and in particular developments in algorithms and AI, employers and recruiters now have access to sophisticated new job candidate screening tools which can help to automate recruitment in ways that were once only imaginable. Algorithms can now be used to filter candidates based on socio-economic data to assist in bolstering an employer’s claims that recruitment is fair. AI now has the ability to analyse a job candidate
Introduction The sorting of populations into measurable types for security and profit through surveillance technologies has amplified the pre-digital fault lines of anti-LGBTQ+ stigma, reinforcing aspects of the hierarchy of human value. As noted in Chapter 1 , algorithmically filtered, discriminatory depictions can reinforce the subordination of a group based on identity, including stereotyping, recognition, denigration and underrepresentation ( Mehrabi et al 2021 ). Platform biometrics such as facial and gait recognition software can be the basis for
Introduction Current research struggles to find solutions to the emerging social harms induced by algorithmic systems. In this paper we understand these harms as systemic and deriving from the increasing development and use of technology and technological systems in diverse sectors of society, which affect what and how social harms are encountered at different layers of society. We discuss automated decision making and its regulation in public authorities, and our approach is informed by our backgrounds in science and technology studies (STS), and legal
Introduction Facebook has identified that I am interested in certain genres of music, even certain bands, and that I regularly go to concerts. On that basis, its algorithm puts me in connection with a concert ticket seller for a band I like, and a sponsored ad is shown on my newsfeed. I click on the ad and contact my friend. I buy two tickets. Algorithms – in this case a recommender model – exert considerable control. They know a lot about me, anticipate my interests, decide what information to show me and even succeed in making me buy concert tickets. In
Algorithmic thinking is both elusive and everywhere. It is hard to see and impossible to avoid. While having significant power and influence, it is so intricately connected into social structures and everyday experiences that it goes almost unnoticed. Very little resides outside or untouched by algorithmic thinking and, crucially, its tensions. Acknowledging this hyped-up incorporation and unbending inescapability, Rosie DuBrin and Ashley E. Gorham (2021) have written of a form of ‘algorithmic interpellation’. To engage with the social world is, frequently
Introduction On 20 March 2020, English schools closed indefinitely. This closure lasted five months, only to fully reopen before the next academic year in September 2020. Between May and July, students were commonly expected to sit a series of standardised assessments in primary, secondary, further and higher education institutions. However due to the forced closure of schools, few examinations were taken within schools. Instead, individual grades were estimated through an ‘algorithm’, a standardised method of assessment prediction based upon a series of
Without wanting to sound too epochal, it could be said that we are living in algorithmic times. We may not want to go so far, and I find myself trying to resist the temptation, but it has become hard to draw any other conclusion. The type of ‘programmed sociality’ to which Taina Bucher (2018 : 4) has referred has become impossible to deny, especially as the algorithm ‘induces, augments, supports, and produces sociality’. Different types of algorithms have come to have very large-scale social consequences, ranging from shaping what people discover, experience
The elementary task of the administration, taking care of people’s basic and human rights, will be significantly enhanced when it is possible to meet people’s personal needs without committing to time and place, mechanically. MoE, 2017: 34 (Era of AI) In line with the goal of Finnish policies on AI to harness the potential of algorithms in business and everyday life ( MoE, 2019 ), several Finnish public authorities have, in recent years, adopted automation to enhance the quality of public services ( Chiusi et al, 2020 ). A key objective of these
