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This book addresses the growing use of computerized systems to influence people's decisions without their awareness, a significant but underappreciated sea-change in the way the world works. To assess these systems, this volume's contributors explore the philosophical and ethical dimensions of algorithms that guide people's behavior by nudging them toward choices preferred by systems architects. Particularly in an era of heightened awareness of bias and discrimination, these systems raise profound concerns about the morality of such activities. This volume brings together a diverse array of thinkers to critically examine these nudging systems. Not only are high-level perspectives presented, but so too are of those who use them on a day-to-day basis. While algorithmic nudging can produce benefits for users there are also many less-obvious costs to using such systems, costs that require examination and deliberation. This book is a major step towards delineating these concerns andsuggesting ways to provide a sounder basis for future policies for algorithms. It should be of interest to system designers, public policymakers, scholars, and those who wonder more deeply about the nudges they receive from various websites and on their phones.
List of contents
1.Introduction.- 2. Nudging and Freedom.- 3. Metaphors we nudge by.- 4. Can Nudges be Democratic?.- 5. Revisiting the Turing Test.- 6. Interview with Stephen Wolfram.- 7. Means vs. Outcomes.- 8. Nudging, positive and negative, on China's Internet.- 9. Nudging choices through media.- 10. Building compliance, manufacturing nudges.- 11. The Emergence of the 'Cy-Mind' through Human-Computer Interaction.- 12. Saying things with facts, or: sending messages through regulation.13. Conclusion: The troubling future of nudging choices through media for humanity.
About the author
James E. Katz, Ph.D., Dr.h.c., is the Feld Professor of Emerging Media at Boston University, United States. Among his honors is the 2021 Frederick Williams Prize from the International Communication Association.
Katie Schiepers is an Academic Administrator and former Division Administrator of Emerging Media Studies at Boston University, United States. She has co-edited
Perceiving the Future through New Communication Technologies with Katz and Floyd (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). She holds a Master of Education and has also completed graduate studies in Classics and World Heritage Conservation.
Juliet Floyd, Ph.D., is Professor of Philosophy at Boston University, United States. Among her recent books is
Stanley Cavell's Must We Mean What We Say? at Fifty (co-edited with Greg Chase and Sandra Laugier, 2021).
