"The other side of words": algocracy
Made of something, apocope ofalgorithm, and the suffix -cracy (which comes from the Greek kratos, the power), algocracy is a term that has been emerging for a few years to designate the new political system in which we would have entered.
A system in which the algorithms – the elementary steps of the calculations used to solve a problem, such as answering a query on a search engine – influence and form part of the decision-making process in various sectors. In the political, economic and social life of society, they could even automatically preempt a power that once belonged to the people in a democracy.
This term is thus the title of three works published between 2020 and 2023: Resist algocracy. Remaining human in our professions and in our lives by Vincent Magos; Algocracy. Living free in the age of algorithms by Arthur Grimonpont; Algocracy. Are we going to give power to algorithms? by Hugues Bersini.
Algocracy and Democracy
Is algocracy about to replace democracy? More and more sovereign, democratic domains are being penetrated by algorithms: filtering and sorting on social networks, decision support (justice, health, etc.), university selection, predictive analysis (police, insurance, etc.). Therefore, many believe that there is a danger of dispossession of the power of the people, the "demos" of democracy, to the benefit of these algorithms.
The global economy, for example, largely operates on financial algorithms. For example, the world's leading asset manager, the American fund BlackRock, notably uses artificial intelligence Aladdin, an investment tool capable of assessing financial risks and which has monitored up to $20 trillion in financial assets.
Today, more than half of the world's population uses social media daily on which recommendation algorithms adjust the content offered to users' preferences and thus shape their representations of the world. Sometimes they escape the will of their creators. By virtue of their operation, which values the reactions generated and without being the explicit will of their creators, they favor, for example, the dissemination of fake news.
A new institutional world
Algocracy would thus be an institutional world where these large transnational companies participating in this form of algorithmic regulation are becoming increasingly important.
However, using the termalgocracy takes us away from responsibility. In reality, in an algocracy, if the power changes, it is not to go from the people to the algorithms. Algorithms materialize power relations and serve very human wills – political, economic, ideological.
Far from being inevitable or obvious, the development of what could be likened to an "algocracy" therefore responds to political choices and to the highlighting of what the legal philosophy researcher Antoinette Rouvroy calls a "algorithmic rationality".
They are political and technical choices of a mode pushed by numbers, raising fears that an algocracy is in fact a new kind of "monitoring company".
myth and philosophy
Algocracy is part of a philosophical and scientific history inherited from the philosophy of the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution of the XNUMXth century.e century that have made rationality a cult.
From this point of view, the culmination of a certain idea of rationality is embodied in this “algorithmic governmentality” synonymous with algocracy. Especially since, as the academic and jurist Alain Supiot says, we believe that governing and exercising power are one and the same, that power should be based on scientific knowledge of the individual and therefore "impersonal". This would explain the spread of a “governance by numbers” where everything, including the law, becomes the object of a calculation.
The idea of an algocracy thus comes from a myth, that of the infallible nature of technology in the face of the fallibility of the individual. Algocracy no longer considers a society as a whole but as nothing more than groups of individuals, atoms.
Adrian Tallent, PhD student in political philosophy and ethics, Sorbonne University
This article is republished from The Conversation under Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article.
