Is A Just Code Possible? Innovation in Information and Algorithmic Systems over Two Hundred Years

Description

Today the power of algorithms to shape our lives is undeniable. The contests are about how fair, just, equitable, and socially useful these information-based decision systems are. They raise issues of power, both in the economic sense of control of markets and in the more political sense of who gets to decide the code and what it is used for. But the issues, and the systems, are deeply embedded in the history of capitalism, and have been developing and proliferating for nearly two centuries.

Join us as Ken Lipartito looks at the earliest examples of such systems, for mediating credit and financial relationships, starting with their origins in the nineteenth century and tracing their development into modern credit assessment surveillance platforms. Over that time most of the same issues that today surround information and decision-making systems arose, were debated, and were decided, in ways that have continued to shape practice down to the present.