Full Description
In Cloud Ethics Louise Amoore examines how machine learning algorithms are transforming the ethics and politics of contemporary society. Conceptualizing algorithms as ethicopolitical entities that are entangled with the data attributes of people, Amoore outlines how algorithms give incomplete accounts of themselves, learn through relationships with human practices, and exist in the world in ways that exceed their source code. In these ways, algorithms and their relations to people cannot be understood by simply examining their code, nor can ethics be encoded into algorithms. Instead, Amoore locates the ethical responsibility of algorithms in the conditions of partiality and opacity that haunt both human and algorithmic decisions. To this end, she proposes what she calls cloud ethics-an approach to holding algorithms accountable by engaging with the social and technical conditions under which they emerge and operate.
Contents
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction. Politics and Ethics in the Age of Algorithms 1
Part 1. Condensation
1. The Cloud Chambers: Condensed Data and Correlative Reason 29
2. The Learning Machines: Neural Networks and Regimes of Recognition 56
Part 2. Attribution
3. The Uncertain Author: Writing and Attribution 85
4. The Madness of Algorithms: Aberration and Unreasonable Acts 108
Part 3. Ethics
5. The Doubtful Algorithm: Ground Truth and Partial Accounts 133
6. The Unattributable: Strategies for a Cloud Ethics 154
Notes 173
Bibliography 197
Index 212
