A proposal that we think about digital technologies such as machine
learning not in terms of artificial intelligence but as artificial
communication.
Algorithms that work with deep learning and big data are getting so much
better at doing so many things that it makes us uncomfortable. How can a
device know what our favorite songs are, or what we should write in an
email? Have machines become too smart? In Artificial Communication,
Elena Esposito argues that drawing this sort of analogy between
algorithms and human intelligence is misleading. If machines contribute
to social intelligence, it will not be because they have learned how to
think like us but because we have learned how to communicate with them.
Esposito proposes that we think of "smart" machines not in terms of
artificial intelligence but in terms of artificial communication.
To do this, we need a concept of communication that can take into
account the possibility that a communication partner may be not a human
being but an algorithm--which is not random and is completely
controlled, although not by the processes of the human mind. Esposito
investigates this by examining the use of algorithms in different areas
of social life. She explores the proliferation of lists (and lists of
lists) online, explaining that the web works on the basis of lists to
produce further lists; the use of visualization; digital profiling and
algorithmic individualization, which personalize a mass medium with
playlists and recommendations; and the implications of the "right to be
forgotten." Finally, she considers how photographs today seem to be used
to escape the present rather than to preserve a memory.
