This blog is about information technology and culture, the history of computing and the Internet. Information technology is embedded in our culture, and our culture is a form of information technology; language is a code, and computer code is a form of language. What happens if you think about them together?
The boom in artificial intelligence and machine learning has led to concerns about the reinforcement of social bias by algorithms. Books like Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction and Virginia Eubanks’ Automating Inequality examine how machine algorithms have furthered existing biases in the culture. There is a longer history to this problem than you might think, one that goes back to the prehistory of electronic computing itself.
The Language of Code 