Life by Algorithms: How Roboprocesses Are Remaking Our World

by Catherine Besteman (Editor), Hugh Gusterson (Editor), Noelle Stout (Contributor)

Computerized processes are everywhere in our society. They are the automated phone messaging systems that businesses use to screen calls; the link between student standardized test scores and public schools’ access to resources; the algorithms that regulate patient diagnoses and reimbursements to doctors. The storage, sorting, and analysis of massive amounts of information have enabled the automation of decision-making at an unprecedented level. Meanwhile, computers have offered a model of cognition that increasingly shapes our approach to the world. The proliferation of “roboprocesses” is the result, as editors Catherine Besteman and Hugh Gusterson observe in this rich and wide-ranging volume, which features contributions from a distinguished cast of scholars in anthropology, communications, international studies, and political science.
 
Although automatic processes are designed to be engines of rational systems, the stories in Life by Algorithms reveal how they can in fact produce absurd, inflexible, or even dangerous outcomes. Joining the call for “algorithmic transparency,” the contributors bring exceptional sensitivity to everyday sociality into their critique to better understand how the perils of modern technology affect finance, medicine, education, housing, the workplace, food production, public space, and emotions—not as separate problems but as linked manifestations of a deeper defect in the fundamental ordering of our society.

224 pages, ebook

Published May 23, 2019

Reviews

[Josh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoyable review of technical concepts.

(Composing this review months later than my reading of the book, I defer to reviews by others. The one comparison I think I recall is being less impressed at how technical concepts were explained in Unscaled than in this book; of course they're focused on covering different subject matter.)

[LaanSiBB]

This is a lazy leftist book.

Analysis out of worries and fear is not enough, as we are all witnesses. If a book title include "our world", it's dangerous and ambiguous, as worlding takes courage and knowledge. If you are not addressing the 50% world population detached from internet, don't use that word. We need to reject universalist bureaucratic language.

There are two ways to make this topic inspiring, one is to expand the definition of life but not falling into transhumanism pure theory, such as focusing on a community in remote areas or the data oppression in details. Another direction comes with solid practice in data justice and democracy under algorithms, such as open source projects for surveilling police in Chicago or folding RNA project to develop vaccine, and why these and that works and doesn't, by context.

Stop generalizing the world with this already dominated language, and stop cutting trees for repetitive intellectual work.