The Tyranny of Algorithms

by Miguel Benasayag, Steven Rendall (Translator)

The impact of the digital world and its algorithms on human beings and societyWe read all sorts of things about AI, as the promise of a future happiness or as a threat capable of putting an end to humanity. While we cannot be "for" or "against" AI – it's already here, and not likely to disappear any time soon - the question we face is how to exist as human beings - individually, socially, collectively - in a world governed by algorithms. Since the dawn of humanity, technological objects have intersected with the human it is we who have shaped them; but as we use them, they in turn shape our brain. With the development of new technologies, this hybridization is becoming more and more apparent, and machines now threaten to colonize us, if we use them badly. AI allows us to make many kinds of work easier, but these benefits often come at the cost of reducing a person to a set of micro-data, far removed from the human characteristics that define him. Worse the whole economy is now subject to the "decisions" suggested by machines. We have entered an era of algorithmic governmentality, in which leaders have deliberately delegated their decision-making to AI.How, then, can we still talk about democracy? And consequently, how can we organize collective action, confronted by a power that is based on the supposed infallibility of machines? Benasayag gives his considered answers in this short but illuminating book, a hybrid of essay and interview.

81 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 22, 2019

Reviews

[Crispin · Rating 4 out of 5]

despite being perfect bound in its physical form, or ephemeral traces in its digital form, this is a pamphlet (pan-philos) in the historical and best senses of the word. First published before the most recent wave of Turing Test passing chatbots, this short interview between an anthropologist and a former guerilla (among other things) nevertheless gets to the/a core of what AI represents in terms of the changes afoot.
Split into three parts, we learn about the evolving project of Western rationality: a historical progression of desacralising the church and society in favour of an individual, rational contact with the divine. Eventually, we delegate the task of ultimate rationality to our machines. The current AI fervour represents a literally religious collective excitement and/or dread that maybe the machines will live up to this task.
We also learn about post-democracy, whereby 'conflictuality', the friction of coexisting with the Other, at the heart of democratic process and life, is replaced by domination, the denial of the Other: the management of life by technocratic means. Resistance is no longer recognised as such, there is no Other to resist. When the technocratic machine struggles, it is not against Resistance, but simply against noise, symptoms or insufficiently specified or solved problems.
Finally, Benasayag suggests in his theory of action that the way forward here is to embrace or accept the intellectual historical context we're in: there is no retreat from the machines, but to surrender to them is equally undesirable. Gone are the Victorian clockwork universes of predictable causality. Complexity, as a primary, current historical/cultural context for understanding the globalised world, prevents us from being able to act so that we can have justified faith in the outcomes of our actions. But we must act anyway. His path is a path of radical unknowing, living in the moment, acting, resisting, living, trying, simply because here we are.
Recommended reading. Don't automatically believe the technocratic hype of today… this book helps cut through that, although it does also suffer from a bit of hand waving hidden behind fancy words and political enthusiasm.
A good tonic against the modern cult, now culture, of efficiency as the dominating virtue. Benasayag calls for dysfunctionality, in the best sense: to be functional is to be efficient, but efficiency is for machines, and we would do well to resist being colonised by our machines, by the tide that would claim us as functional beings, and to reclaim our right to simply… exist.

[Mayelly Moreno · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting exploration of AI and the complex links to ideas of the individual, politics, prediction, and democracy.

[ellen · Rating 1 out of 5]

my copy has highlighted passages of sublime beauty but also, a magnitude of pencil frowney faces and "waste of my time !!" scratched onto the last page. nothing of substance but scattered with quotable sentences. waste of my time !!