Author meets critics: cloud ethics

Thursday 10 Sept 2020, 14:00 → 15:30 Europe/London

Chair

• Marieke de Goede (University of Amsterdam)

Participants

• Belcher Oliver (Durham University)
• Marieke de Goede (University of Amsterdam)
• Amoore Louise (Durham University)
• Martin Coward (University of Manchester)

In Cloud Ethics (Duke University Press, 2020), Louise Amoore examines how machine learning algorithms are transforming the ethics and politics of contemporary society. Conceptualising algorithms as ethicopolitical entities that are entangled with the data attributes of people, Amoore outlines how algorithms give incomplete accounts of themselves, learn through relationships with human practices, and exist in the world in ways that exceed their source code. In these ways, algorithms and their relations to people cannot be understood by simply examining their code, nor can ethics be encoded into algorithms.

Amoore offers a new view on the debate on fairness in algorithmic calculation, by paying attention to the conditions of partiality and opacity that haunt both human and algorithmic decisions. She proposes what she calls “cloud ethics” as a way to hold algorithms accountable by engaging with the social and technical conditions under which they emerge and operate.

This roundtable facilities a discussion about Cloud Ethics and a meeting between the author and her critical readers.

1 Author meets critics: cloud ethics