Caring for the Monstrous Algorithm: Attending to Wrinkly Worlds and Relationalities in an Algorithmic Society
Book chapter, 2024

This text proposes that we, social analysts of algorithms, need to develop a split vision for the algorithm-as-technological-object and the algorithm-as-assemblage in order to effectively attend to, analyse, and critique algorithms in society. The point of departure is that we need to distance ourselves from a simplified and reductive understanding of algorithms-as-objects, and care for them as part of a composite algorithmic assemblage. A simplified notion of algorithms is problematic for two reasons: First, as it produces a reductive notion of the world where decision-makers point to algorithms-as-objects to simplify decisions about the world. Second, by taking a simplified and delineated object called “algorithm” as the point of departure for analysis and critique in an algorithmic society, we risk producing technologically deterministic understandings of complex and composite problems. We illustrate this argument through two examples drawn from the handling of COVID-19 pandemic, where we attend to a universalist mathematical epidemiology and the particularities of field epidemiology to problematize how we should care for, understand, and analyse algorithms in society.

Author

Francis Lee

Chalmers, Technology Management and Economics, Science, Technology and Society

Catharina Landström

Chalmers, Technology Management and Economics, Science, Technology and Society

Karl Palmås

Chalmers, Technology Management and Economics, Science, Technology and Society

Reframing Algorithms: STS perspectives to Healthcare Automation

99-119
978-3-031-52048-8 (ISBN)

The New Scientific Revolution? AI and Big Data in Biomedicine

Marianne och Marcus Wallenberg Foundation (DnrC2020-0150), 2020-08-01 -- 2025-08-31.

Areas of Advance

Information and Communication Technology

Health Engineering

Subject Categories

History of Ideas

Sociology

Public Health, Global Health, Social Medicine and Epidemiology

DOI

10.1007/978-3-031-52049-5_5

More information

Created

6/11/2024