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    What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing
    What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing
    What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing
    Audiobook8 hours

    What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing

    Written by Ed Finn

    Narrated by Scott Merriman

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    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 What Algorithms Want, 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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrilliance Audio
    Release dateMar 28, 2017
    ISBN9781536667608
    What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing
    Author

    Ed Finn

    Ed Finn is the founding director of the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University, where he is an assistant professor with a joint appointment in the School of Arts, Media and Engineering and the Department of English. He has worked as a journalist at Time, Slate, and Popular Science.

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    Reviews for What Algorithms Want

    3.5/5

    41 ratings3 reviews

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    • 5/5
      A brilliant and illuminating book about our cultural moves toward enshrining tech companies and partnering with computer systems.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      Huge vocabulary. About philosophy of computers. Fun to listen to.
    • 3/5
      Insufferably pretentious writing makes it tiresome to read, even though the content is interesting and at times insightful.