Epistemology

Users of the internet emphasize retrieving and manipulating information over contextualizing or conceptualizing its meaning. They rarely interrogate history or philosophy; as a rule, they demand information relevant to their immediate practical needs. In the process, search-engine algorithms acquire the capacity to predict the preferences of individual clients, enabling the algorithms to personalize results and make them available to other parties for political or commercial purposes. Truth becomes relative. Information threatens to overwhelm wisdom.

“As a scholar of science, technology and society, I also hope that this will include explicit and implicit social and political assumptions and choices built into these models. Issues of bias, representativity, inclusion and exclusion will unfold not merely in relation to the models, but relative to infrastructural, economic and political power, ” Rommetveit said.

“Important here are strong tendencies to scale up in order to incorporate the greatest possible amounts of content and data: how will this shape scientific activities, and the social roles and uses of the sciences?”