Rage Inside the Machine, Robert Elliott Smith
Rage Inside the Machine, Robert Elliott Smith
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Rage Inside the Machine
The Prejudice of Algorithms, and How to Stop the Internet Making Bigots of Us All

Author: Robert Elliott Smith

Narrator: Sean Pratt

Unabridged: 12 hr 19 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Ascent Audio

Published: 09/29/2020


Synopsis

We live in a world increasingly ruled by technology; we seem as governed by technology as we do by laws and regulations. Frighteningly often, the influence of technology in and on our lives goes completely unchallenged by citizens and governments. We comfort ourselves with the soothing refrain that technology has no morals and can display no prejudice, and it's only the users of technology who distort certain aspects of it.

But is this statement actually true? Dr. Robert Smith thinks it is dangerously untrue in the modern era. Having worked in the field of artificial intelligence for over thirty years, Smith reveals the mounting evidence that the mechanical actors in our lives do indeed have, or at least express, morals: they're just not the morals of the progressive modern society that we imagined we were moving towards. Instead, as we are just beginning to see—in the US elections and Brexit to name but a few—there are increasing incidences of machine bigotry, greed, and the crass manipulation of our basest instincts.

This book demonstrates how non-scientific ideas have been encoded deep into our technological infrastructure. Offering a rigorous, fresh perspective on how technology has brought us to this place, Rage Inside the Machine challenges the long-held assumption that technology is an apolitical and amoral force.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Elaine

I want to give this a higher rating because the topic is so interesting, but the mathematical understanding necessary to read this book will make it inaccessible to so many people. It's been a long time since my last calculus class, so a lit of this went over my head. But if you skip over the equati......more

Goodreads review by Andrew

This is a great book by University College London professor and vastly experienced AI and algorithm expert Rob Smith. It's marketed as being about the way algorithms polarise online communities and encourage division, but it's much more than that - history, science, mathematics, statistics and perso......more

Goodreads review by Smut

This book takes a little reading. Let me explain that sentence. This book is written by a computer engineer so he is very attracted to numbers and formulas. There are a lot of these in this book. However when you get past all of it the message is a very good one on human interaction and bias.......more

Goodreads review by Maxwell

i didnt expect to like this much at all, especially with its title / cover but the book picks up at the feminist section at chapter 7 and is pretty solid for the rest......more

Goodreads review by Jesse

I’m on the fence with this one. The subject matter is of interest to me, but the proto-dystopian view of data analytics is... difficult to parse. I don’t believe that what the author posits is untrue, but it does feel weighty on the side of unintended evils in technology.......more