Rage Inside the Machine: The Prejudice of Algorithms, and How to Stop the Internet Making Bigots of Us All, Hardcover

An investigative journey into the sources of morality in artificial intelligence and how this impacts our society.

Offering a rigorous, fresh perspective on how technology has brought us to this place, Mechanisms of Morality challenges the long-held assumption that technology is an apolitical and amoral force. Having worked in the field of artificial intelligence for over 30 years, Smith reveals the mounting evidence that the mechanical actors in our lives have, or at least express, morals: they're just not the morals of the progressive modern society that we imagined we were moving towards. Instead, as we are just beginning to see--in the US elections and Brexit to name but a few--there are increasing incidences of machine bigotry, greed and the crass manipulation of our basest instincts.

It is easy to assume that these are the result of programmer prejudices or the product of dark forces manipulating the masses through the network of the Internet. But what if there is something more fundamental and explicitly mechanical at play, something inherent within technology itself?

This book demonstrates how non-scientific ideas have been encoded into our technological infrastructure. Shedding light on little-known historical stories and investigating the complex connections between scientific philosophy, institutional prejudice and technology, this book offers a new and more truly scientific vision of ourselves.

Rob Smith authored over 35 journal articles, 10 book chapters, and over 75 conference papers on these subjects. He has conducted research projects for the U.S. Army Strategic Defense Command, The Center for Nonlinear Studies, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratories, NASA, Boeing, NSF, EPSRC, the European Union, DERA, British Aerospace, Airbus, and British Telecom. Rob is a former Associate Editor of The IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, and the journal Evolutionary Computation and a fellow of the RSA: The Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce.

Currently, he works as Chief Technology Office for BOXARR Ltd, a company he helped to found. He also works part time as a Senior Research Fellow of Computer Science at University College London, where he was also a founding member of The UCL Centre for The Study of Decision-Making Uncertainty.