What do you think?
Rate this book
The Death Algorithm and Other Digital Dilemmas
Provocative takes on cyberbullshit, smartphone zombies, instant gratification, the traffic school of the information highway, and other philosophical concerns of the Internet age.
In The Death Algorithm and Other Digital Dilemmas, Roberto Simanowski wonders if we are on the brink of a society that views social, political, and ethical challenges as technological problems that can be fixed with the right algorithm, the best data, or the fastest computer. For example, the “death algorithm� is programmed into a driverless car to decide, in an emergency, whether to plow into a group of pedestrians, a mother and child, or a brick wall. Can such life-and-death decisions no longer be left to the individual human?
In these incisive essays, Simanowski asks us to consider what it means to be living in a time when the president of the United States declares the mainstream media to be an enemy of the people—while Facebook transforms the people into the enemy of mainstream media. Simanowski describes smartphone zombies (or “smombies�) who remove themselves from the physical world to the parallel universe of social media networks; calls on Adorno to help parse Trump's tweeting; considers transmedia cannibalism, as written text is transformed into a postliterate object; compares the economic and social effects of the sharing economy to a sixteen-wheeler running over a plastic bottle on the road; and explains why philosophy mat become the most important element in the automotive and technology industries.
In The Death Algorithm and Other Digital Dilemmas, Roberto Simanowski wonders if we are on the brink of a society that views social, political, and ethical challenges as technological problems that can be fixed with the right algorithm, the best data, or the fastest computer. For example, the “death algorithm� is programmed into a driverless car to decide, in an emergency, whether to plow into a group of pedestrians, a mother and child, or a brick wall. Can such life-and-death decisions no longer be left to the individual human?
In these incisive essays, Simanowski asks us to consider what it means to be living in a time when the president of the United States declares the mainstream media to be an enemy of the people—while Facebook transforms the people into the enemy of mainstream media. Simanowski describes smartphone zombies (or “smombies�) who remove themselves from the physical world to the parallel universe of social media networks; calls on Adorno to help parse Trump's tweeting; considers transmedia cannibalism, as written text is transformed into a postliterate object; compares the economic and social effects of the sharing economy to a sixteen-wheeler running over a plastic bottle on the road; and explains why philosophy mat become the most important element in the automotive and technology industries.
208 pages, Paperback
Published December 4, 2018
3 people are currently reading
148 people want to read
About the author
Roberto Simanowski
28Ìýbooks14ÌýfollowersRoberto Simanowski is a German scholar of media and cultural studies and the author of Digital Art and Meaning, Data Love, Facebook Society, Waste: A New Media Primer, and The Death Algorithm and Other Digital Dilemmas (the last two published by the MIT Press).
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
January 17, 2019
Given the contents of this book, I don’t feel like I should be rating it at all. There’s no need to increase its digital capital, and that may not even be healthy, but I thoroughly enjoyed this book and found it to be an insightful take on many postmodern, digital dilemmas. A truly engrossing and exciting read. And it’s a series of short essays as well. So it’s very easily digestible.
January 30, 2020
Verging on 3*, given the penultimate essay is randomly riddled with typos and type errors, but the subject matter comes through brilliantly overall. Roberto clearly feels the dissonance between our physical lives and those we lead on the phone, including the collapse of “space� that occurs as we disengage, such as using our phones while walking, when getting from Point A to Point B.
The book is very approachable, given the subject matter, by being broken down into a more digestible essays that have a unified subject matter, rather than a single thread to follow throughout.
A huge thanks to MIT Press for translating all these works in their Untimely Meditations series. It’s nice to be able to read the work of modern philosophers without having to worry my German will let me down. Will encourage me to buy the original text of my favorites, too, for subsequent rereading.
The book is very approachable, given the subject matter, by being broken down into a more digestible essays that have a unified subject matter, rather than a single thread to follow throughout.
A huge thanks to MIT Press for translating all these works in their Untimely Meditations series. It’s nice to be able to read the work of modern philosophers without having to worry my German will let me down. Will encourage me to buy the original text of my favorites, too, for subsequent rereading.
January 7, 2025
Purchased at Collected Works Bookstore in Santa Fe. This is a collection of essays investigating philosophical concerns with technology and artificial intelligence. I particularly liked the essay, The Death Algorithm, which discusses ethical concerns involving self driving cars. This book was published in 2018 and is a bit obsessed with Trump, as he took office in 2017. The essays are hit or miss.
Read
January 27, 2022as someone who has a background in both computer science and philosophy, i found there to be a general lack of nuance in the technological conundrums discussed in these essays. are there huge ethical concerns in the field of technology (& artificial intelligence specifically)? yes. do i think this book did justice to those concerns? no.
January 6, 2025
I gave up at “if oedipus gouged his eyes out after discovering he f-ed his mom, why didn’t tech executives chop off their hands which they used to code the addicting like button?�
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
Can't find what you're looking for?
Get help and learn more about the design.