The Everyday Life of an Algorithm

ISBN-13: 9783030005771 / Angielski / Twarda / 2019 / 151 str.

Daniel Neyland

Opis

This book offers a detailed analysis of a security algorithm in order to explore broader social and digital implications. A system designed to enhance airport security will be used to explore how value and values are built into algorithms; through what means algorithmic systems can be demonstrated; how algorithms make sense of the human; the difficulties in getting an algorithmic system to work and the experimentation this requires; and what it means to successfully build a market for an algorithm. The main purpose of this project is to demonstrate how the everyday existence of an algorithm can be studied in order to provide insights into our growing concerns with algorithmic systems.

Spis treści

1. Introduction: Everyday life and the algorithm

2. Experimentation with a probable human-shaped object

3. Accountability and the algorithm

4. The deleting machine and its discontents 

5. Demonstrating the algorithm

6. Market value and the everyday life of the algorithm 

O autorze

Daniel Neyland is Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths, the University of London, UK. His research engages with issues of governance, accountability and ethics in forms of science, technology and organization. He has published books on privacy and surveillance, organizational ethnography, mundane governance (co-authored with Steve Woolgar) and markets (co-authored with Vera Ehrenstein and Sveta Milyaeva).

Blurb

This open access book begins with an algorithm–a set of IF…THEN rules used in the development of a new, ethical, video surveillance architecture for transport hubs. Readers are invited to follow the algorithm over three years, charting its everyday life. Questions of ethics, transparency, accountability and market value must be grasped by the algorithm in a series of ever more demanding forms of experimentation. Here the algorithm must prove its ability to get a grip on everyday life if it is to become an ordinary feature of the settings where it is being put to work. Through investigating the everyday life of the algorithm, the book opens a conversation with existing social science research that tends to focus on the power and opacity of algorithms. In this book we have unique access to the algorithm’s design, development and testing, but can also bear witness to its fragility and dependency on others.