Cloud Ethics: Algorithms and the Attributes of Others

‌The techniques deployed in deep neural net algorithms to condense the features of a scene to an output of meaning – “a man is throwing a Frisbee in a park”, “a woman is standing at the border fence with a crowd in the background” – give an account of the ethico-politics of algorithms for our times. The output of the algorithms reduces the intractable difficulties and duress of living, the undecidability of what could be happening in a scene, into a single human-readable and actionable meaning. We have ethical and political relationships with other beings in the world because the meaning of those relations, their mediation through every scene of life, cannot be condensed. It is precisely irreducible. And so, at the very moment that the algorithm outputs a single meaning from an irreducible scene, there is also at this border limit a “clause of nonclosure”, as Derrida describes the opening of context. How does one begin to locate the points of nonclosure within the algorithm’s programme of meaning-making? In contrast to the widespread search for ethical limits of the actions of algorithms, I propose a cloud ethics that is concerned with the formation of relations to oneself and to others. Are there counter-methods of attention available to us that could resist the frameworks of attention of machine learning? Amid the technologies of the attribute, what remains of that which is unattributable in the scene?

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