Trust an algorithm, or trust your neighbor?

A computer inference however may draw upon massive data and complex correlations, you can’t argue with the machine, and you can’t see how to change. You have no say and governance is replaced with management […] 

The profound erosion of trust in the Digital City leaves a vacuum, and we look to our tools to fill it. We seem set upon interlocking trajectories: of ever greater swaths of the human experience being computationally managed, and of intractable human subjects increasingly breaking down or revolting against these conditions.

The network of algorithms makes so many decisions for us, and yet we have little way of talking back to it or changing how it works. This imbalance induces a state of passivity: We consume what the feeds recommend to us without engaging too deeply with the material. We also adapt the way we present ourselves online to its incentives. We write tweet

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To conclude, the new computer network will not necessarily be either bad or good. All we know for sure is that it will be alien and it will be fallible. We therefore need to build institutions that will be able to check not just familiar human weaknesses like greed and hatred but also radically alien errors. There is no technological solution to th

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So we had better call upon our lawyers, politicians, philosophers, and even poets to turn their attention to this conundrum: how do you regulate the ownership of data? This may well be the most important political question of our era. If we cannot answer this question soon, our sociopolitical system might collapse. People are already sensing the co

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