The most urgent story in modern tech begins not in Silicon Valley but two hundred years ago in rural England, when workers known as the Luddites rose up rather than starve at the hands of factory owners who were using automated machines to erase their livelihoods. The Luddites organized guerrilla raids to smash those machines—on punishment of death—and won the support of Lord Byron, enraged the Prince Regent, and inspired the birth of science fiction. This all-but-forgotten class struggle brought nineteenth-century England to its knees. Today, technology imperils millions of jobs, robots are crowding factory floors, and artificial intelligence will soon pervade every aspect of our economy. How will this change the way we live? And what can we do about it? The answers lie in Blood in the Machine. Brian Merchant intertwines a lucid examination of our current age with the story of the Luddites, showing how automation changed our world—and is shaping our future.
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Guest editor Nora N. Khan and fifteen luminaries question our problematic faith in and deference to AI. Exploring the limits of knowledge, prediction, language, and abstraction in computation, their collected essays and artworks measure the gap between machine learning hypotheticals and the mess of lived experience.
In this publication we inquire into a technology of accidents, but also into the forms of power and authority that accidents materialize. What are the specific accidents of – call them what you wish: artificial intelligence, machine learning, enhanced pattern recognition – systems?
Drawing on more than a decade of research, award‑winning scholar Kate Crawford reveals how AI is a technology of extraction: from the minerals drawn from the earth to the labor pulled from low-wage information workers to the data taken from every action and expression.
In What Algorithms Want, Ed Finn considers how the algorithm – in practical terms, “a method for solving a problem” – has its roots not only in mathematical logic but also in cybernetics, philosophy, and magical thinking.
Since 2008, CreativeApplications.Net has been a driving force, tirelessly shaping the conversations about technology, society, and critical making. From online and offline publications to live events, CAN has shaped many of the innovative creative practices we know today.
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