Trust an algorithm, or trust your neighbor?

In her book, The Politics of Possibility, sociologist Louise Amoore argues for designing algorithms as tools that can present decision-makers and community stakeholders with multiple possibilities for identifying and addressing social problems, rather than seeing algorithms as the solver of problems. This means agency stays with people, not machine... See more

Getting citizens to play an active role in the institutions that govern them has never been easy, but we have decades of research into best practices for encouraging participatory governance.

It’s not just that we are being mined for information. I believe this algorithmic catering to our private desires only serves to make us trust each other less. We live in a self-perpetuating social cycle where the more time we spend as isolated individuals consuming algorithmically-curated culture, the more we trust algorithms over each other.

Communities with low levels of trust engage in what he calls “hunkering” or withdrawing from social life, which, he argued, reduces their ability to engage in collective action to address problems in their communities. But it can have even more dire consequences. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, philosopher Hannah Arendt saw social isolation from... See more

Algorithmic surveillance aims to ensure that citizens behave in a manner consistent with a society’s core values—as interpreted by the state, in China’s case. But we can think of ours as a private credit system that regulates behavior algorithmically for the purposes of private gain rather than state control. Our version is pernicious in different ... See more

If massive amounts of data and computational power are being employed to guide or constrain our decisions, then how much can we trust the authenticity of our choices, and how can we trust each other?

So how do we use algorithms in ways that preserve individual autonomy and freedom? To address this dilemma, we need to understand algorithms as sites of power and find ways to restore the balance. We should assert our digital rights to not have data be used unfairly to manipulate or control us—and this must be done collectively.

According to the World Values Survey, in the early eighties, 44 percent of Americans thought their fellow citizens could be trusted most of the time, but that percentage fell to the mid-thirties by 2014. This lack of trust is particularly pronounced among partisans: according to Pew, in 1994, 21 percent of Republicans and 17 percent of Democrats ha... See more

Our goal should be to make algorithms into tools to help us expand—not restrict—the ways we can live our lives.