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    Life by Algorithms: How Roboprocesses Are Remaking Our World
    Unavailable
    Life by Algorithms: How Roboprocesses Are Remaking Our World
    Unavailable
    Life by Algorithms: How Roboprocesses Are Remaking Our World
    Ebook374 pages3 hours

    Life by Algorithms: How Roboprocesses Are Remaking Our World

    By University of Chicago Press

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    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Computerized processes are everywhere in our society. They are the automated phone messaging systems that businesses use to screen calls; the link between student standardized test scores and public schools’ access to resources; the algorithms that regulate patient diagnoses and reimbursements to doctors. The storage, sorting, and analysis of massive amounts of information have enabled the automation of decision-making at an unprecedented level. Meanwhile, computers have offered a model of cognition that increasingly shapes our approach to the world. The proliferation of “roboprocesses” is the result, as editors Catherine Besteman and Hugh Gusterson observe in this rich and wide-ranging volume, which features contributions from a distinguished cast of scholars in anthropology, communications, international studies, and political science.
     
    Although automatic processes are designed to be engines of rational systems, the stories in Life by Algorithms reveal how they can in fact produce absurd, inflexible, or even dangerous outcomes. Joining the call for “algorithmic transparency,” the contributors bring exceptional sensitivity to everyday sociality into their critique to better understand how the perils of modern technology affect finance, medicine, education, housing, the workplace, food production, public space, and emotions—not as separate problems but as linked manifestations of a deeper defect in the fundamental ordering of our society.

    Contributors
    Catherine Besteman, Alex Blanchette, Robert W. Gehl, Hugh Gusterson, Catherine Lutz, Ann Lutz Fernandez, Joseph Masco, Sally Engle Merry, Keesha M. Middlemass, Noelle Stout, Susan J. Terrio
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
    Release dateMay 23, 2019
    ISBN9780226627731
    Unavailable
    Life by Algorithms: How Roboprocesses Are Remaking Our World

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    Reviews for Life by Algorithms

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    • 1/5
      As a Canadian, I have no interest in American left-wing conspiracy theories dressed up as academic thoughtfulness.

      I question the following canards, chestnuts, though they seem…
      How is it that “roboprocesses” only ever helped Trump? Are we to believe that Hillary was too pure to use the same technology, she of the unsanctioned email servers and Steele dossier?
      Or that roboprocesses helped get Bush elected - that’s why he went to court to get a ruling on hanging chads, right - but had no influence on Gore’s election results.
      Or that Facebook algorithms only ever benefit the Alt-right, but never the left?
      Or that Google search algorithms only ever harm blacks, never help them.

      Read this only if you are willing to uncritically rehash America’s liberal conspiracies one more time!

      1 person found this helpful