The darker side of algorithmic regulation

[StylesGrant]

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/20/rise-of-data-death-of-politics-evgeny-morozov-algorithmic-regulation?commentpage=2

 

http://www.guardianbookshop.co.uk/BerteShopWeb/viewProduct.do?ISBN=9780241957707

 

 

The rise of data and the death of politics

Tech pioneers in the US are advocating a new data-based approach to governance – 'algorithmic regulation'. But if technology provides the answers to society's problems, what happens to governments?

"To his credit, MacBride understood all of this in 1967. "Given the resources of modern technology and planning techniques," he warned, "it is really no great trick to transform even a country like ours into a smoothly running corporation where every detail of life is a mechanical function to be taken care of." MacBride's fear is O'Reilly's master plan: the government, he writes, ought to be modelled on the "lean startup" approach of Silicon Valley, which is "using data to constantly revise and tune its approach to the market". It's this very approach that Facebook has recently deployed to maximise user engagement on the site: if showing users more happy stories does the trick, so be it.

Algorithmic regulation, whatever its immediate benefits, will give us a political regime where technology corporations and government bureaucrats call all the shots. The Polish science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem, in a pointed critique of cybernetics published, as it happens, roughly at the same time as The Automated State, put it best: "Society cannot give up the burden of having to decide about its own fate by sacrificing this freedom for the sake of the cybernetic regulator."

 

spike91nz

20 July 2014 7:08am

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The algorithms imagined are developed within a set of assumptions regarding relevant aspects of the system counting for significance and value. It is the assumptions within which the algorithms are constructed that are (or need to be) open for public and political debate. The algorithm is not a neutral and objective construction, but rather one tailored to the assumptions defining the purpose and design applied to the indifferent system. If the world is seen only in terms of economic values, those aspects of human existence resistant to such reductionism, and those impossible to be determined values for future generations, will be excluded by those obsessed with immediate personal profits. If we wish to establish a steady-state socio-political machine in a rentalist's economy, without opportunity for freedom or progress, then the cybernetic algorithms will serve that purpose. They will however demand ever finer constraints upon the individual variables, until the specific calories and allowable waste are calculated for each inhabitant of a maximally populated dystopian reality. Is this really the best future that we can imagine?