Machine Habitus. Massimo Airoldi

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Название Machine Habitus
Автор произведения Massimo Airoldi
Жанр Социология
Серия
Издательство Социология
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781509543298



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toolkit of ethology mobilized by Rahwan and colleagues (2019) in a recent Nature article is probably not up to this aim, for a quite simple reason: machine learning tools are eminently social animals. They learn from the social – datafied, quantified and transformed into computationally processable information – and then they manipulate it, by drawing probabilistic relations among people, objects and information. While Rahwan et al. are right in putting forward the ‘scientific study of intelligent machines, not as engineering artefacts, but as a class of actors with particular behavioural patterns and ecology’ (2019: 477), their analytical framework focuses on ‘evolutionary’ and ‘environmental’ dimensions only, downplaying the cornerstone of anthropological and sociological explanations, that is, culture. Here I argue that, in order to understand the causes and implications of algorithmic behaviour, it is necessary to first comprehend how culture enters the code of algorithmic systems, and how it is shaped by algorithms in turn.

      A second, qualitative shift concerns the types of machines and AI technologies embedded in our digital society. The development and industrial implementation of machine learning algorithms that ‘enable computers to learn from experience’ have marked an important turning point. ‘Experience’, in this context, is essentially ‘a dataset of historic events’, and ‘learning’ means ‘identifying and extracting useful patterns from a dataset’ (Kelleher 2019: 253).

      Recent accomplishments in AI research – such as AlphaGo, the deep learning system that achieved a historic win against the world champion of the board game Go in 2016 (Chen 2016; Broussard 2018), or GPT-3, a powerful algorithmic model released in 2020, capable of autonomously writing poems, computer code and even philosophical texts (Weinberg 2020; Askell 2020) – indicate that the ongoing shift toward the increasingly active and autonomous participation of algorithmic systems in the social world is likely to continue into the near future. But let’s have a look at the past first.

      More generally, algorithms can be intended as computational recipes, that is, step-by-step instructions for transforming input data into a desired output (Gillespie 2014). According to Gillespie (2016: 19), algorithms are essentially operationalized procedures that must be distinguished from both their underlying ‘model’ – the ‘formalization of a problem and its goal, articulated in computational terms’ – and their final context of application, such as the technical infrastructure of a social media platform like Facebook, where sets of algorithms are used to allocate personalized content and ads in users’ feeds. Using a gastronomic metaphor, the step-by-step procedure for cooking an apple pie is the algorithm, the cookbook recipe works as the model, and the kitchen represents the application context. However, in current public and academic discourse, these different components and meanings tend to be conflated, and the term algorithm is broadly employed as a synecdoche for a ‘complex socio-technical assemblage’ (Gillespie 2016: 22).

      This book does not aim to offer heavily technical definitions, nor an introduction to algorithm design and AI technologies; the reader can easily find such notions elsewhere.2 Throughout the text, I will frequently make use of the generic terms ‘algorithm’ and ‘machine’ to broadly indicate automated systems producing outputs based on the computational elaboration of input data. However, in order to highlight the sociological relevance of the quali-quantitative transition from Euclid’s calculations to today’s seemingly ‘intelligent’ artificial agents like GPT-3 and AlphaGo, some preliminary conceptual distinctions are needed. It is apparent, in fact, that the everyday socio-cultural implications of algebraic formulas solved for centuries by hand or via mechanical calculators are not even close in magnitude to those of the algorithms currently governing information networks.

      Below I briefly outline