Algorithms silently structure our lives. Algorithms can determine whether someone is hired, promoted, offered a loan, or provided housing as well as determine which political ads and news articles consumers see. Yet, the responsibility for algorithms in these important decisions is not clear. This article identifies whether developers have a responsibility for their algorithms later in use, what those firms are responsible for, and the normative grounding for that responsibility. I conceptualize algorithms as value-laden, rather than neutral, in that algorithms (...) create moral consequences, reinforce or undercut ethical principles, and enable or diminish stakeholder rights and dignity. In addition, algorithms are an important actor in ethical decisions and influence the delegation of roles and responsibilities within these decisions. As such, firms should be responsible not only for the value-laden-ness of an algorithm but also for designing who-does-what within the algorithmic decision. As such, firms developing algorithms are accountable for designing how large a role individual will be permitted to take in the subsequent algorithmic decision. Counter to current arguments, I find that if an algorithm is designed to preclude individuals from taking responsibility within a decision, then the designer of the algorithm should be held accountable for the ethical implications of the algorithm in use. (shrink)

This article responds to recent debates in critical algorithm studies about the significance of the term “algorithm.” Where some have suggested that critical scholars should align their use of the term with its common definition in professional computer science, I argue that we should instead approach algorithms as “multiples”—unstable objects that are enacted through the varied practices that people use to engage with them, including the practices of “outsider” researchers. This approach builds on the work of Laura Devendorf, Elizabeth Goodman, (...) and Annemarie Mol. Different ways of enacting algorithms foreground certain issues while occluding others: computer scientists enact algorithms as conceptual objects indifferent to implementation details, while calls for accountability enact algorithms as closed boxes to be opened. I propose that critical researchers might seek to enact algorithms ethnographically, seeing them as heterogeneous and diffuse sociotechnical systems, rather than rigidly constrained and procedural formulas. To do so, I suggest thinking of algorithms not “in” culture, as the event occasioning this essay was titled, but “as” culture: part of broad patterns of meaning and practice that can be engaged with empirically. I offer a set of practical tactics for the ethnographic enactment of algorithmic systems, which do not depend on pinning down a singular “algorithm” or achieving “access,” but which rather work from the partial and mobile position of an outsider. (shrink)

Algorithms have developed into somewhat of a modern myth. On the one hand, they have been depicted as powerful entities that rule, sort, govern, shape, or otherwise control our lives. On the other hand, their alleged obscurity and inscrutability make it difficult to understand what exactly is at stake. What sustains their image as powerful yet inscrutable entities? And how to think about the politics and governance of something that is so difficult to grasp? This editorial essay provides a critical (...) backdrop for the special issue, treating algorithms not only as computational artifacts but also as sensitizing devices that can help us rethink some entrenched assumptions about agency, transparency, and normativity. (shrink)

In this article, we develop the concept of Transparency by Design that serves as practical guidance in helping promote the beneficial functions of transparency while mitigating its challenges in automated-decision making environments. With the rise of artificial intelligence and the ability of AI systems to make automated and self-learned decisions, a call for transparency of how such systems reach decisions has echoed within academic and policy circles. The term transparency, however, relates to multiple concepts, fulfills many functions, and holds different (...) promises that struggle to be realized in concrete applications. Indeed, the complexity of transparency for ADM shows tension between transparency as a normative ideal and its translation to practical application. To address this tension, we first conduct a review of transparency, analyzing its challenges and limitations concerning automated decision-making practices. We then look at the lessons learned from the development of Privacy by Design, as a basis for developing the Transparency by Design principles. Finally, we propose a set of nine principles to cover relevant contextual, technical, informational, and stakeholder-sensitive considerations. Transparency by Design is a model that helps organizations design transparent AI systems, by integrating these principles in a step-by-step manner and as an ex-ante value, not as an afterthought. (shrink)

Organizations increasingly rely on algorithm-based HR decision-making to monitor their employees. This trend is reinforced by the technology industry claiming that its decision-making tools are efficient and objective, downplaying their potential biases. In our manuscript, we identify an important challenge arising from the efficiency-driven logic of algorithm-based HR decision-making, namely that it may shift the delicate balance between employees’ personal integrity and compliance more in the direction of compliance. We suggest that critical data literacy, ethical awareness, the use of participatory (...) design methods, and private regulatory regimes within civil society can help overcome these challenges. Our paper contributes to literature on workplace monitoring, critical data studies, personal integrity, and literature at the intersection between HR management and corporate responsibility. (shrink)

Algorithms, once obscure objects of technical art, have lately been subject to considerable popular and scholarly scrutiny. What does it mean to adopt the algorithm as an object of analytic attention? What is in view, and out of view, when we focus on the algorithm? Using Niklaus Wirth's 1975 formulation that “algorithms + data structures = programs” as a launching-off point, this paper examines how an algorithmic lens shapes the way in which we might inquire into contemporary digital culture.

How can one ‘see’ the operationalization of contemporary visual culture, given the imperceptibility and apparent automation of so many processes and dimensions of visuality? Seeing – as a position from a singular mode of observation – has become problematic since many visual elements, techniques, and forms of observing are highly distributed through data practices of collection, analysis and prediction. Such practices are subtended by visual cultural techniques that are grounded in the development of image collections, image formatting and hardware design. (...) In this article, we analyze recent transformations in forms of prediction and data analytics associated with spectacular performances of computation. We analyze how transformations in the collection and accumulation of images as ensembles by platforms have a qualitative and material effect on the emergent sociotechnicality of platform ‘life’ and ‘perception’. Reconstructing the visual transformations that allow artificial intelligence assemblages to operate allows some sense of their heteronomous materiality and contingency. (shrink)

The discourse around self-driving cars has been dominated by an emphasis on their potential to reduce the number of accidents. At the same time, proponents acknowledge that self-driving cars would inevitably be involved in fatal accidents where moral algorithms would decide the fate of those involved. This is a necessary trade-off, proponents suggest, in order to reap the benefits of this new technology. In this article, I engage this argument, demonstrating how an undue optimism and enthusiasm about this technology is (...) obscuring our ability to see what is at stake and explaining how moving beyond the dominant utilitarian framings around this technology opens up a space for both ethical inquiry and innovative design. I suggest that a genuine caring concern for the many lives lost in car accidents now and in the future—a concern that transcends false binary trade-offs and that recognizes the systemic biases and power structures that make certain groups more vulnerable than others—could serve as a starting point to rethink mobility, as it connects to the design of our cities, the well-being of our communities, and the future of our planet. (shrink)

The growing presence of smart devices in our lives turns all of society into something largely unknown to us. The strategy of demanding transparency stems from the desire to reduce the ignorance to which this automated society seems to condemn us. An evaluation of this strategy first requires that we distinguish the different types of non-transparency. Once we reveal the limits of the transparency needed to confront these devices, the article examines the alternative strategy of explainable artificial intelligence and concludes (...) with the idea that these types of complex realities exceed individual capacities and are only comprehensible in a collective fashion. (shrink)

This paper contributes to inquiries into the genealogy of governmentality and the nature of secularization by arguing that pastoralism continues to operate in the algorithmic register. Drawing on Agamben’s notion of signature, I elucidate a pair of historically distant yet archaeologically proximate affinities: the first between the pastorate and algorithmic control, and the second between the absconded God of late medieval nominalism and the authority of algorithms in the cybernetic age. I support my hypothesis by attending to the signaturial kinships (...) between, on the one hand, temporality and authority in our contemporary conjuncture, and, on the other, obedience and submission in Christian thought from late antiquity and the late Middle Ages. I thereby illustrate the hidden genealogical continuities between theological-pastoral technologies of power and technocratic-algorithmic modalities of governance. I conclude by suggesting that medieval counter-conducts may be redeployed in our present circumstances for emancipatory ends. (shrink)

Critical algorithm scholarship has demonstrated the difficulties of attributing accountability for the actions and effects of algorithmic systems. In this commentary, we argue that we cannot stop at denouncing the lack of accountability for algorithms and their effects but must engage the broader systems and distributed agencies that algorithmic systems exist within; including standards, regulations, technologies, and social relations. To this end, we explore accountability in “the Generated Detective,” an algorithmically generated comic. Taking up the mantle of detectives ourselves, we (...) investigate accountability in relation to this piece of experimental fiction. We problematize efforts to effect accountability through transparency by undertaking a simple operation: asking for permission to re-publish a set of the algorithmically selected and modified words and images which make the frames of the comic. Recounting this process, we demonstrate slippage between the “complication” of the algorithm and the obscurity of the legal and institutional structures in which it exists. (shrink)

Frequent public uproar over forms of data science that rely on information about people demonstrates the challenges of defining and demonstrating trustworthy digital data research practices. This paper reviews problems of trustworthiness in what we term pervasive data research: scholarship that relies on the rich information generated about people through digital interaction. We highlight the entwined problems of participant unawareness of such research and the relationship of pervasive data research to corporate datafication and surveillance. We suggest a way forward by (...) drawing from the history of a different methodological approach in which researchers have struggled with trustworthy practice: ethnography. To grapple with the colonial legacy of their methods, ethnographers have developed analytic lenses and researcher practices that foreground relations of awareness and power. These lenses are inspiring but also challenging for pervasive data research, given the flattening of contexts inherent in digital data collection. We propose ways that pervasive data researchers can incorporate reflection on awareness and power within their research to support the development of trustworthy data science. (shrink)

AI technologies hold great promise for addressing existing problems in organizational contexts, but the potential benefits must not obscure the potential perils associated with AI. In this article, we conceptually explore these promises and perils by examining AI use in organizational contexts. The exploration complements and extends extant literature on AI management by providing a typology describing four types of AI use, based on the idea of co-constitution of AI technologies and organizational context. Building on this typology, we propose three (...) recommendations for informed use of AI in contemporary organizations. First, explicitly define the purpose of organizational AI use. Second, define the appropriate level of transparency and algorithmic management for organizational AI use. Third, be aware of AI’s context-dependent nature. (shrink)

In science and technology studies today, there is a troubling tendency to portray actors in the biosciences as “cultural dopes” and technology as having monolithic qualities with predetermined outcomes. To remedy this analytical impasse, this article introduces the concept styles of valuation to analyze how actors struggle with valuing technology in practice. Empirically, this article examines how actors in a bioscientific laboratory struggle with valuing the properties and qualities of algorithms in a high-throughput setting and identifies the copresence of several (...) different styles. The question that the actors struggle with is what different configurations of algorithms, devices, and humans are “good bioscience,” that is, what do the actors perform as a good distribution of agency between algorithms and humans? A key finding is that algorithms, robots, and humans are valued in multiple ways in the same setting. For the actors, it is not apparent which configuration of agency and devices is more authoritative nor is it obvious which skills and functions should be redistributed to the algorithms. Thus, rather than tying algorithms to one set of values, such as “speed,” “precision,” or “automation,” this article demonstrates the broad utility of attending to the multivalence of algorithms and technology in practice. (shrink)

How are data science systems made to work? It may seem that whether a system works is a function of its technical design, but it is also accomplished through ongoing forms of discretionary work by many actors. Based on six months of ethnographic fieldwork with a corporate data science team, we describe how actors involved in a corporate project negotiated what work the system should do, how it should work, and how to assess whether it works. These negotiations laid the (...) foundation for how, why, and to what extent the system ultimately worked. We describe three main findings. First, how already-existing technologies are essential reference points to determine how and whether systems work. Second, how the situated resolution of development challenges continually reshapes the understanding of how and whether systems work. Third, how business goals, and especially their negotiated balance with data science imperatives, affect a system’s working. We conclude with takeaways for critical data studies, orienting researchers to focus on the organizational and cultural aspects of data science, the third-party platforms underlying data science systems, and ways to engage with practitioners’ imagination of how systems can and should work. (shrink)

The power of algorithms has become a familiar topic in society, media, and the social sciences. It is increasingly common to argue that, for instance, algorithms automate inequality, that they are biased black boxes that reproduce racism, or that they control our money and information. Implicit in many of these discussions is that algorithms are permeated with normativities, and that these normativities shape society. The aim of this editorial is double: First, it contributes to a more nuanced discussion about algorithms (...) by discussing how we, as social scientists, think about algorithms in relation to five theoretical ideal types. For instance, what does it mean to go under the hood of the algorithm and what does it mean to stay above it? Second, it introduces the contributions to this special theme by situating them in relation to these five ideal types. By doing this, the editorial aims to contribute to an increased analytical awareness of how algorithms are theorized in society and culture. The articles in the special theme deal with algorithms in different settings, ranging from farming, schools, and self-tracking to AIDS, nuclear power plants, and surveillance. The contributions thus explore, both theoretically and empirically, different settings where algorithms are intertwined with normativities. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

This article develops a method for investigating the consequences of algorithmic systems according to the documents that specify their design constrains. As opposed to reverse engineering algorithms to identify how their logic operates, the article proposes to design or "forward engineer" algorithmic systems in order to theorize how their consequences are informed by design constraints: the specific problems, use cases, and presuppositions that they respond to. This demands a departure from algorithmic reformism, which responds to concerns about the consequences of (...) algorithmic systems by proposing to make algorithms more transparent or less biased. Instead, by investigating algorithmic systems according to documents that specify their design constraints, we identify how the consequences of algorithms are presupposed by the problems that they propose to solve, the types of solutions that they enlist to solve these problems, and the systems of authority that these solutions depend on. To accomplish this, this article develops a methodological framework for researching the process of designing algorithmic systems. In doing so, it proposes to move beyond reforming the technical implementation details of algorithms in order to address the design problems and constraints that underlie them. (shrink)

The paper deals with the quandary of the neutrality and transparency of technologies. First, I show how this problem is connected with the image of the opening of 'black boxes' that is pivotal to much of science and technology studies. Second, methodological and socio-political dimensions of the 'black box' metaphor are discussed. Third, I analyze three typical solutions to the problem of the neutrality of technologies outside and inside constructivist technology studies. It is demonstrated that despite their apparent differences, these (...) solutions are similar in their logic of conceptualizing technology as a neutral intermediary. Forth, I look for an alternative to this logic in the actor-network theory of Bruno Latour. Here technologies are conceived in terms of an eventful association of heterogeneous entities irreducible to its conditions of possibility. The construction of technologies is understood as mediation, or as a 'making-do' process where creators are surprised by their creations and vice versa. In Latour's actor-network, technologies are interpreted as opaque and non-neutral entities. Finally, I turn to some object-lessons from smart technologies powered by neural networks to demonstrate that these are empirical vindications of Latour's conception of technical mediation. Particular attention is paid to the opacity and (non)interpretability of machine learning algorithms. (shrink)

Much bioethical literature and policy guidances for big data analytics in biomedical research emphasize the importance of trust. It is essential that potential participants trust so they will allow their data to be used to further research. However, comparatively, little guidance is offered as to what trustworthy oversight mechanisms are, or how policy should support them, as data are collected, shared, and used. Generally, “trust” is not characterized well enough, or meaningfully enough, for the term to be systematically applied in (...) policy development. Yet points made in the philosophical literature on trust can help. They allow us, not only to better distinguish the different ways the term “trust” may be interpreted, but also to better determine how different approaches to trust can align with policy and governance—in what ways they may relate to key bioethical concepts and related laws, and in what ways they can help to balance individual and group interests in data sharing. This article draws from the philosophical literature on trust to identify a relationship among consent, trust, and justice. Specifically, parallels are drawn between “character-trustworthiness” and “natural justice,” a set of widely held legal safeguards intended to ensure decision-makers follow a pattern of procedural fairness which protects the rights of the individual and thereby maintains public confidence in the decision-making process. Relevance to traditional bioethical principles, established laws, and consent procedures are addressed throughout. In conclusion, policy actions are suggested. (shrink)

While research in HCI on dealing with cultural issues when designing ICTs tended to adopt fixed and taxonomic views, recent theoretical perspectives closer to the social sciences have called for attending to the contingent, fluid, and dynamic aspects of the notion of culture. In this article, we contribute to translating these perspectives into an approach for informing design. We focus on abandoning prior conceptions of culture to allow the discovery of cultural differences through inductive field research while engaging with the (...) target community. This allows a view on cultural difference that is generative for design: it is unique to each case, and it also remains close to the concerns of community members. We base our approach on Basile Zimmermann’s (2015) waves and forms framework, and we illustrate it through our engagement and design with VOCI, a local voluntary community of tech-savvy university students in Syria between 2011 and 2015. (shrink)

Information security governance has become an elusive goal and a murky concept. This paper problematizes both information security governance and the broader concept of governance. What does it mean to govern information security, or for that matter, anything? Why have information technologies proven difficult to govern? And what assurances can governance provide for the billions of people who rely on information technologies every day? Drawing together several distinct bodies of literature—including multiple strands of governance theory, actor–network theory, and scholarship on (...) sociotechnical regimes—this paper conceptualizes networked action on a spectrum from uncertain governance to governing uncertainty. I advance a twofold argument. First, I argue that networks can better govern uncertainty as they become more able not only to enroll actors in a collective agenda, but also to cut ties with those who seek to undermine that agenda. And second, I argue that the dominant conception of information security governance, which emphasizes governing uncertainty through risk management, in practice devolves to uncertain governance. This is largely because information technologies have evolved toward greater connectedness—and with it, greater vulnerability—creating a regime of insecurity. This evolution is illustrated using the history of the US government’s efforts to govern information security. (shrink)

Este volumen contiene los trabajos presentados en el I Simposio de Pensamiento Contemporáneo, celebrado en la Universidad Técnica Particular de Loja (UTPL) durante los días 23 y 24 de enero de 2019 y cuyo tema central fue las «Nuevas Tecnologías en la Educación» (SPC–NTE). Este Simposio tuvo como objetivo fomentar la interacción entre personas de diferentes formaciones e intereses en la discusión de problemas y soluciones relevantes para la educación en la era digital, a fin de intercambiar ideas sobre prácticas (...) e investigaciones que busquen comprender, mejorar y ampliar el uso de las nuevas tecnologías en los procesos de enseñanza–aprendizaje en los más diferentes contextos de enseñanza. 28 trabajos analizan abordan temáticas de especial interés para los futuros docentes, así como para quienes ya se desempeñan como tales en los diversos niveles educativos. Estos textos son instantáneas breves, ágiles y claras de las contribuciones teóricas o de experiencias pedagógicas que tratan sobre ambientes, softwares y hardwares para apoyar la enseñanza y aprendizaje; TIC en la educación universitaria; técnicas y estrategias lúdicas en educación; experiencias pedagógicas con las TIC y humanidades digitales en la educación. (shrink)