Big Data, Big Brother, & Algorithmic Tyranny:
A Guide to Analysis & Fightback

Project in process by Ralph Dumain


Algorithmic Justice League

“The Algorithmic Justice League is an organization that combines art and research to illuminate the social implications and harms of artificial intelligence. AJL’s mission is to raise public awareness about the impacts of AI, equip advocates with empirical research to bolster campaigns, build the voice and choice of most impacted communities, and galvanize researchers, policymakers, and industry practitioners to mitigate AI bias and harms.”

Coded Bias documentary

Our Library (videos & texts)

 . . . And the phenomenal woman behind it: Joy Buolamwini.


Other Web Sites

Data & Society

Videos

Adam Greenfield on Radical Technologies (videos)

Ethics & AI, The Helix Center, streamed live on Sept. 26, 2020 (2:00:55)

A.I. and Stochastic Parrots, FACTUALLY (Adam Conover) with Emily Bender and Timnit Gebru (1:12:25)

Artificial Intelligence: What’s next? by Sabine Hossenfelder (25:10)

Books

Amoore, Louise. Cloud Ethics: Algorithms and the Attributes of Ourselves and Others. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020.

Bridle, James. New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future. London; Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2018.

Self, Will. New Dark Age by James Bridle review – technology and the end of the future, The Guardian, 30 June 2018.

Broussard, Meredith. Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World. Cambridge, MA; London:The MIT Press, 2018.

Buolamwini, Joy. Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What Is Human in a World of Machines. New York: Random House, 2023.

Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. Discriminating Data. Correlation, Neighbourhoods, and the Politics of Recognition. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2021.

Dyer-Witheford, Nick; Kjøsen, Atle Mikkola; Steinhoff, James. Inhuman Power: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Capitalism. London: Pluto Press, 2019.

Eubanks, Virginia. Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2017.

The High-Tech Poorhouse: An interview with Virginia Eubanks by Sam Adler-Bell, Jacobin, Januuary 2018.

Forsythe, Diana E. Studying Those Who Study Us: An Anthropologist in the World of Artificial Intelligence, edited with an introduction by David J. Hess. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001.

Greenfield, Adam. Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life. London; New York: Verso, 2017.

Adam Greenfield on Radical Technologies (videos)

Katz, Yarden. Artificial Whiteness: Politics and Ideology in Artificial Intelligence. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020.

Macnish, Kevin; Galliott, Jai; eds. Big Data and Democracy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020.

Noble, Safiya Umoja. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York: New York University Press, 2018.

O'Neil, Cathy. Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy. New York: Crown, 2016.

O’Shea, Lizzie. Future Histories: What Ada Lovelace, Tom Paine, and the Paris Commune Can Teach Us about Digital Technology. London; New York: Verso, 2019.

Pattern Discrimination, edited by Clemens Apprich, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Florian Cramer, and Hito Steyerl. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018.

Wark, McKenzie. Capital Is Dead: Is This Something Worse? London; New York: Verso, 2019.

Articles

Aradau, Claudia; Bunz, Mercedes. “Dismantling the Apparatus of Domination? Left Critiques of AI,” Radical Philosophy 2.12, Spring 2022.

Bender, Emily M.; Gebru, Timnit; McMillan-Major, Angelina; Shmitchell, Shmargaret. “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?” FAccT ’21, March 3–10, 2021, Virtual Event, Canada; pp. 610-623.

Bender, Emily M.; Koller, Alexander. “Climbing towards NLU: On Meaning, Form, and Understanding in the Age of Data, ” Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, July 5 - 10, 2020, pp. 5185–5198.

LessWrong [critique of its pseudo-rationalism & biases], @ RationalWiki.

Lynch, Clifford. ‘Stewardship in the “Age of Algorithms”,’ First Monday, Volume 22, No. 12, 4 December 2017.

On the issues in archiving data.

Song, Bing. “Applying Ancient Chinese Philosophy to Artificial Intelligence,” Noema, August 20, 2020.

This specimen of utter nonsense, a ridiculous take on Daoism especially and also Confucianism and Buddhism, and sadly too historically characteristic of the dishonest propaganda about the ‘harmony’ of Asian cultures, devoid of contact with the reality of contemporary China and its totalitarian deployment of interactive technology, takes propagandistic drivel about both Chinese philosophy and artificial intelligence to new depths of idiocy and obfuscation. This is sound bite philosophical journalism at its worst as we face the monsters of fascism and extinction.

Dystopian scenarios

Wijeratne, Yudhanjaya. Future Tense: “The State Machine”; Slate, September 26, 2020.

“A new short story imagines a government run entirely by machines.”

Divya, S. B. “Under the Gaze of Big Mother,” Slate, September 26, 2020.

‘Yudhanjaya Wijeratne’s “The State Machine” shows the danger of trusting machines to be free of bias.’

Florian Cramer: Selected Bibliography

Cybernetics & Artificial Intelligence: Ideology Critique

Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), 1920-2020


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Uploaded 7 October 2020
Last update 15 November 2023
Previous update 27 May 2022

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