“We can’t always explain how algorithms reach their decisions. The reasoning of algorithms, like the will of God, is unfathomable.”
Tag: Technology
Episode 5: Data & Racial Capitalism
How have data-centric systems perpetuated racial capitalism, and how have different communities, particularly in the global South, resisted this datafication?
Episode 4: Data & Infrastructure
Whose values get embedded into the algorithms that increasingly govern our lives? How are these data infrastructures complicating what it means to be human?
No Cure
Tech promises to cure any ailment, whether an unwelcome feeling or a global pandemic. But what if tech itself is ill? And what is a cure, anyway?
Episode 3: Data & Automation
What harms can result from AI and automation, and how might we address and prevent those harms?
The Indifference Engine
Nobody knows what will be useful in the future. And this is why we so often find humanistic activities in the seeds and roots of STEM.
Episode 2: Data & Labor
How has data been used to organize labor, and how do we make ourselves visible to data-centric systems?
Episode 1: Data & Humanity
How do people show up in data, and what are some of the inequalities that can result from data collection?
Trailer: Becoming Data
How long has human life been quantified as data, and in what contexts? What are some major implications of humanity being measured as data?
What Does a “Click” Count For?
In the digital world, metrics mean everything. But who interprets just what they mean changes across organizations, countries, and cultures.
Eugenics Powers IQ and AI
Both the definition of “intelligence” and the tech industry are deeply entwined with white domination. Will white-supremacist AI be the result?
Worker Worries Are the Seeds of Worker Action
Apps like Uber benefit from making their workers strangers to one another. So what happens when workers start caring for one another?
Can Free Assembly Survive the Internet?
When the internet is in everything, its problems are everywhere.
What Counts, These Days, in Baseball?
As technologies of quantification and video capture grow more sophisticated, is baseball changing? Do those changes have moral implications?
Users of the World, Unite?
Critical examinations of the internet too often focus on the successes and failures of corporate leaders, rather than on the real constituents of online communities.
Public Thinker: Shobita Parthasarathy on Why We Need to Diversify Expertise
“I'll say something controversial. Bioethics tends to not interrogate the details of science, let alone the more technical questions.”
The Dark Matter of Digital Health
Digital health is solidifying the divide between those whose health is valued and those whose health is ignored.
Wrongworld
Even with its ambitious and compelling premise of robot revolution, HBO’s Westworld lacks the imagination to follow the story to its logical outcomes.
Water as Right, Water as Future
Declaring water a human right is easy. But to actually secure that right, the best method—surprisingly—is bureaucratic sleights of hand.
The Limits of Telecommuting
Perhaps the lesson to take from this year of living online is not about making better technology. It’s about recognizing technology’s limits.