Machine logic: our lives are ruled by big tech's 'decisions by data'

In the early 1970s, Hannah Arendt wrote a devastating critique of the Pentagon's Vietnam-era penchant for policy by counting. "The problem-solvers did not judge," she wrote. Exuding the spirit of gamblers rather than statesmen, the decision-makers played "the percentage game", counting whatever could be counted and ignoring the rest, or the underlying problems, with "an utterly irrational confidence in the calculability of reality". With artificial intelligence and machine learning, technologies that are fast becoming very significant actors, "we are in another moment of irrational confidence", says renowned technology and culture researcher Kate Crawford. Aiming at population-level predictive gambles, these technologies filter who and what counts, including "who is released from jail, what kind of treatment you'll get in hospital, the very news that you see".