How Data Happened: A History from the Age of Reason to the Age of Algorithms - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook How Data Happened: A History from the Age of Reason to the Age of Algorithms write by Chris Wiggins. This book was released on 2023-03-21. How Data Happened: A History from the Age of Reason to the Age of Algorithms available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. “Fascinating.” —Jill Lepore, The New Yorker A sweeping history of data and its technical, political, and ethical impact on our world. From facial recognition—capable of checking people into flights or identifying undocumented residents—to automated decision systems that inform who gets loans and who receives bail, each of us moves through a world determined by data-empowered algorithms. But these technologies didn’t just appear: they are part of a history that goes back centuries, from the census enshrined in the US Constitution to the birth of eugenics in Victorian Britain to the development of Google search. Expanding on the popular course they created at Columbia University, Chris Wiggins and Matthew L. Jones illuminate the ways in which data has long been used as a tool and a weapon in arguing for what is true, as well as a means of rearranging or defending power. They explore how data was created and curated, as well as how new mathematical and computational techniques developed to contend with that data serve to shape people, ideas, society, military operations, and economies. Although technology and mathematics are at its heart, the story of data ultimately concerns an unstable game among states, corporations, and people. How were new technical and scientific capabilities developed; who supported, advanced, or funded these capabilities or transitions; and how did they change who could do what, from what, and to whom? Wiggins and Jones focus on these questions as they trace data’s historical arc, and look to the future. By understanding the trajectory of data—where it has been and where it might yet go—Wiggins and Jones argue that we can understand how to bend it to ends that we collectively choose, with intentionality and purpose.
An Ed-Tech Tragedy?
An Ed-Tech Tragedy? - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook An Ed-Tech Tragedy? write by UNESCO. This book was released on 2023-09-08. An Ed-Tech Tragedy? available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle.
What Algorithms Want
What Algorithms Want - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook What Algorithms Want write by Ed Finn. This book was released on 2017-03-10. What Algorithms Want available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. The gap between theoretical ideas and messy reality, as seen in Neal Stephenson, Adam Smith, and Star Trek. We depend on—we believe in—algorithms to help us get a ride, choose which book to buy, execute a mathematical proof. It's as if we think of code as a magic spell, an incantation to reveal what we need to know and even what we want. Humans have always believed that certain invocations—the marriage vow, the shaman's curse—do not merely describe the world but make it. Computation casts a cultural shadow that is shaped by this long tradition of magical thinking. In this book, Ed Finn considers how the algorithm—in practical terms, “a method for solving a problem”—has its roots not only in mathematical logic but also in cybernetics, philosophy, and magical thinking. Finn argues that the algorithm deploys concepts from the idealized space of computation in a messy reality, with unpredictable and sometimes fascinating results. Drawing on sources that range from Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash to Diderot's Encyclopédie, from Adam Smith to the Star Trek computer, Finn explores the gap between theoretical ideas and pragmatic instructions. He examines the development of intelligent assistants like Siri, the rise of algorithmic aesthetics at Netflix, Ian Bogost's satiric Facebook game Cow Clicker, and the revolutionary economics of Bitcoin. He describes Google's goal of anticipating our questions, Uber's cartoon maps and black box accounting, and what Facebook tells us about programmable value, among other things. If we want to understand the gap between abstraction and messy reality, Finn argues, we need to build a model of “algorithmic reading” and scholarship that attends to process, spearheading a new experimental humanities.
The Eye of the Master
The Eye of the Master - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook The Eye of the Master write by Matteo Pasquinelli. This book was released on 2023-10-10. The Eye of the Master available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. What is AI? A dominant view describes it as the quest "to solve intelligence" - a solution supposedly to be found in the secret logic of the mind or in the deep physiology of the brain, such as in its complex neural networks. The Eye of the Master argues, to the contrary, that the inner code of AI is shaped not by the imitation of biological intelligence, but the intelligence of labour and social relations, as it is found in Babbage's "calculating engines" of the industrial age as well as in the recent algorithms for image recognition and surveillance. The idea that AI may one day become autonomous (or "sentient", as someone thought of Google's LaMDA) is pure fantasy. Computer algorithms have always imitated the form of social relations and the organisation of labour in their own inner structure and their purpose remains blind automation. The Eye of the Master urges a new literacy on AI for scientists, journalists and new generations of activists, who should recognise that the "mystery" of AI is just the automation of labour at the highest degree, not intelligence per se.
The Ordinal Society
The Ordinal Society - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook The Ordinal Society write by Marion Fourcade. This book was released on 2024. The Ordinal Society available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Organizations now measure and rank nearly every aspect of our lives, using data to make predictions about our purchasing power, tastes, and character. The Ordinal Society shows how these predictions structure life chances, producing a hollow morality that launders familiar forms of social advantage into an illusion of merit.
