algocracy
n. Rule or government by algorithm.
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Etymology
Examples
2017
In the ‘Threat of Algocracy’ I used ideas and arguments drawn from political philosophy to assess the social and political impact of algorithmic governance. I defined algorithmic governance — or as I prefer ‘algocracy’ — as the use of data-mining, predictive and descriptive analytics to constrain and control human behaviour. I then argued that the increased prevalence of algocratic systems posed a threat to the legitimacy of governance.
—John Danaher, “Algocracy as Hypernudging: A New Way to Understand the Threat of Algocracy,” Philosophical Disquisitions, January 11, 2017
2016
As the entities dictating how computers make such "smart" decisions, algorithms are fueling this, and more than a few writers have coined clever ways to describe contemporary society’s reliance on them: algocracy, algorithmic culture, new theology, idols and/or gods.
—Francis Sanzaro, “Religion and Algorithms: The Showdown of the Century,” The Huffington Post, June 02, 2016
2002
In an ideal-typical sense, the new form of management – or what I call algocracy, i.e., the rule of algorithm – shifts from its industrial predecessor chiefly in two respects. First, domination is less and less distributed through elaborate worker hierarchies; rather, it is increasingly effected through information and software systems that structure the possible forms of work behavior. Second, algocratic governance appears to partly transform the early subject-object relationships, where a superordinate as an observing subject must watch over the work of a subordinate.
—A. Aneesh, “Technologically Coded Authority: The Post-Industrial Decline in
Bureaucratic Hierarchies
” (PDF), Stanford University, April 01, 2002
1998 (earliest)
The initial governments actually consist of computers designed expressly for the job of governing fairly. Since these algocracies (for want of a better word) could quite easily have been created to think in a way completely unlike the nationalistic way that the governments of today tend to think.
—Andrew Sayers, “Plot - Initial governments,” alt.games.galileo, May 20, 1998
Notes
Thanks to Tim O'Reilly for spying this word.
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