Machine learning algorithms are transforming the ethics and politics of contemporary society. Algorithms can be conceptualized as ethico-political entities entangled with the data attributes of people, that give incomplete accounts of themselves, learn through relations with human practices, and exist in ways that exceed their source code. In this event, Louise Amoore and Audrey Borowski will discuss the ethical responsibility of algorithms. The notion of “cloud ethics” calls for holding algorithms accountable by engaging the social and technical conditions under which they emerge.

This conversation will take up these questions while also asking: what resonances exist between the geopolitical breakdown of a rules-based liberal order and the critique of rules-based algorithms in machine learning? How might we think about forms of power, order, and rationality beyond the familiar story of alliances between big tech and the state? These questions also open onto the spatial configurations of AI—whether in violent spatialities like biometrics in refugee camps or AI prompts in war, or in the novel spaces of machine learning itself: feature space, embedding space, latent space.

Louise Amooreis a professor of human geography at Durham University  and the Director of the Leverhulme Centre for Algorithmic Life and. She is known for her research on the politics and ethics of AI, biometrics, and machine learning technologies. She is the author of Cloud Ethics: Algorithms and the Attributes of Ourselves and Others published by Duke University Press in 2020.

Audrey Borowski is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow and Isaac Newton Trust Fellow at the University of Cambridge working on the philosophy of artificial intelligence. She received her doctorate from the University of Oxford and is a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement and Aeon. Her first monograph Leibniz in His World: The Making of a Savant has been published by Princeton University Press.