On 2nd November, I gave a talk entitled “The Threat of Algocracy: Reality, Resistance and Accommodation” to the Programmable City Project at Maynooth University. You can watch the video of my presentation (minus the Q&A) above. The talk defended one central thesis: That the increase in algorithm-based decision making poses a threat to the legitimacy of our … More Understanding the Threat of Algocracy

In this post I want to take a look at an article by Frank Pasquale and Danielle Keats Citron. The article is entitled “The Scored Society: Procedural Due Process for Automated Predictions”. The article looks at the recent trend for using big data to “score” various aspects of human behaviour. For example, there are now … More Procedural Due Process and the Dangers of Predictive Analytics

Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon is the classic symbol of authoritarianism. Bentham, a revolutionary philosopher and social theorist, adapted the idea from his brother Samuel. The panopticon was a design for a prison. It would be a single watchtower, surrounded by a circumference of cells. From the watchtower a guard could surveil every prisoner, whilst at the same time … More Sousveillance and Surveillance: What kind of future do we want?

The Borg are the true villains of the Star Trek universe. True, the Klingons are warlike and jingoistic, the Romulans are devious and isolationist, and the Cardassians are just plain devious, but their methods and motivations are, for want of a better word, all too human-like. The Borg are truly alien: a hive-like superorganism, bent … More Are we creating a Borg-like Society?

An increasing number of people are worried about the way in which our data is being mined by governments and corporations. One of these people is Evgeny Morozov. In an article that appeared in the MIT Technology Review back in October 2013, he argued that this trend poses a serious threat to democracy, one that should … More Rule by Algorithm? Big Data and the Threat of Algocracy