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Algorithmic anxieties: Trevor Paglen in conversation with Anthony Downey

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Notes

  1. See: Kate Crawford and Trevor Paglen, “Excavating AI: The Politics of Training Sets for Machine Learning”, 19 September 2019, https://excavating.ai.

  2. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk project, according to its website, is s “crowdsourcing marketplace that makes it easier for individuals and businesses to outsource their processes and jobs to a distributed workforce who can perform these tasks virtually.” See: https://www.mturk.com.

  3. See, “Excavating AI: The Politics of Training Sets for Machine Learning”, op cit.

  4. In 2019, it was revealed that a facial recognition database, MegaFace, had “scraped” Flickr accounts for images without the account holder’s knowledge or consent. Containing images of 700,000 individuals, the MegaFace dataset has been used by companies to train face-identification algorithms for the purpose of identifying protesters, surveil terrorists, and, according to a recent article, spy on the public at large. See: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/11/technology/flickr-facial-recognition.html.

  5. The full title in the English translation, published in 1970, is The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (Les Mots et les Choses: Une Archéologie des Sciences Humaines).

  6. Agamben has argued that “apparatuses must always imply a process of subjectification, that is to say, they must produce their subject.” See: Giorgio Agamben, “What Is an Apparatus,” in What Is an Apparatus?: And Other Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2009), 11.

  7. For details of pay rates used by Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, see: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/01/amazon-mechanical-turk/551192/.

  8. See: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/25/technology/facebook-moderator-job-ptsd-lawsuit.html.

  9. See: https://anatomyof.ai/img/ai-anatomy-map.pdf.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Alona Pardo, Jon Astbury, Daisy Robinson-Smith, and Elisa Adami for facilitating the above conversation and transcript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Birmingham City University, Birmingham, UK

    Trevor Paglen & Anthony Downey

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  1. Trevor Paglen
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  2. Anthony Downey
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Correspondence to Anthony Downey.

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Paglen, T., Downey, A. Algorithmic anxieties: Trevor Paglen in conversation with Anthony Downey. Digi War 1, 18–28 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s42984-020-00001-2

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