Duke University Press Cloud Ethics: Algorithms and the Attributes of Ourselves and Others

In Cloud Ethics Louise Amoore examines how machine learning algorithms are transforming the ethics and politics of contemporary society. Conceptualizing 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. Instead, Amoore locates the ethical responsibility of algorithms in the conditions of partiality and opacity that haunt both human and algorithmic decisions. To this end, she proposes what she calls cloud ethics―an approach to holding algorithms accountable by engaging with the social and technical conditions under which they emerge and operate. Review "Amoore's text will be of great interest to critical communication scholars, political scientists, and researchers from other disciplines and fields interested in critical algorithm studies. ... Cloud Ethics is a text that will exceed its source, one that will benefit debates and contention within the academic fields it touches on as well as society at large." --Catherine Jeffery "International Journal of Communication" (1/1/2021 12:00:00 AM) "Amoore . . . has written what I consider to be essential reading for anyone interested in the ethical and political analysis of our digital condition."--Davide Panagia "Public Books" (10/6/2020 12:00:00 AM) "Similar to scholars such as N. Katherine Hayles, Amoore engages with a wide range of philosophers and novelists to make sense of the ethicopolitical implications of algorithms. As a result, the book is highly engaging and is densely packed with novel ideas and concepts (e.g., 'space of play' and 'algorithmic author function') that will undoubtedly take on a life of their own in future research. Given their proliferation in society, there has never been a more apt time to examine the ethicopolitical impact of algorithms, and Louise Amoore's Cloud Ethics is the book to turn to."--Ben Jacobsen "Information, Communication & Society" (8/3/2020 12:00:00 AM) "Calling for an embrace of the contingency and doubt that is inherent in the structure and working of algorithms, this important book refuses mythologies of certainty and machinic omnipotence. Framing computation as a partial accounting, Cloud Ethics moves beyond the unproductive binaries of 'good' and 'bad, ' to consider algorithms as generative of complex political possibilities."--Caren Kaplan, author of "Aerial Aftermaths: Wartime from Above" "Beautifully written and richly documented, Louise Amoore's Cloud Ethics analyzes the workings of algorithms in contemporary society, from those assessing security risks to self-learning and self-programming neural nets. She draws on her extensive interviews with experts in the field to explore the nuances of algorithmic doubt and certainty. Finally, she calls for a new ethics of doubt in which the individual components of algorithms are scrutinized to open new spaces for critique that can 'crack open' the seemingly certain fabulations of algorithmic calculation. Technically stunning and critically informed, this book is required reading for anyone interested in how to resist the current trends toward algorithmic governmentality."--N. Katherine Hayles, Distinguished Research Professor of English, University of California, Los Angeles About the Author Louise Amoore is Professor of Political Geography at Durham University and author of The Politics of Possibility: Risk and Security beyond Probability, also published by Duke University Press.