Life by Algorithms: How Roboprocesses Are Remaking Our World
Catherine Besteman and Hugh Gusterson
Abstract
The book explores, analyzes, and critiques the ubiquitous, confounding, and powerful ways in which automated processes derived from binary computer logic have infiltrated contemporary life. Roboprocesses are automated models intended to evaluate, enhance profitability or efficiency, audit, or standardize human behavior. Based on evaluation protocols or formulaic scripts for interaction and judgment mobilized by commercial and state bureaucracies in their dealings with customers and citizens, roboprocesses shape human experience and action, create categories and thus identities and hierarchies, ... More
The book explores, analyzes, and critiques the ubiquitous, confounding, and powerful ways in which automated processes derived from binary computer logic have infiltrated contemporary life. Roboprocesses are automated models intended to evaluate, enhance profitability or efficiency, audit, or standardize human behavior. Based on evaluation protocols or formulaic scripts for interaction and judgment mobilized by commercial and state bureaucracies in their dealings with customers and citizens, roboprocesses shape human experience and action, create categories and thus identities and hierarchies, define reality, and mold future action. Authors examine how algorithms are applied to such diverse processes and arenas as standardized testing protocols mandated by No Child Left Behind, audits, social media, felony convictions, the mortgage crisis, pig farming, deportations of minors, international indicators, and surveillance. In each of these examples, roboprocesses take on a life of their own, mandating the collection of data in certain predetermined kinds of ways that in turn shape how outcomes are imagined and produced.
Keywords:
algorithms,
roboprocesses,
audit cultures,
standardization,
computerized processes,
automation
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2019 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780226627427 |
| Published to Chicago Scholarship Online: January 2020 |
DOI:10.7208/chicago/9780226627731.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Catherine Besteman, editor
Colby College
Hugh Gusterson, editor
George Washington University
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