Algorithms of Anxiety - by Anthony Elliott (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Machine learning algorithms are widely presumed to herald a world in which the crippling burdens of anxiety can be left behind. The digital revolution promises a brave new world where individuals, communities and organizations can at last take control of the future - anticipating, designing and commanding the future, possibly even with mathematical exactitude. Yet, paradoxically, algorithms have unleashed widespread fears and forebodings about the impact of digital technologies. Whether it's worries about unemployment, distress about social media's harmful effects on teenagers, or the fear of intrusive digital surveillance, we live in an age of turbo-charged anxiety where the prophecies of algorithms are increasingly enmeshed with fundamental disruption and anxieties about the future.

In this book, Anthony Elliott examines how machine learning algorithms are not only transforming global institutions but also rewriting our personal lives. He tells this story through a wide-ranging analysis which takes in ChatGPT, Amazon, the Metaverse, Martin Ford, Netflix, Uber, Bernard Stiegler, Squid Game, Kate Crawford, LaMDA, Byung-Chul Han, autonomous drones, Jean Baudrillard and the automation of warfare.

Questioning why people often assume that they need to adopt new technologies in order to lead fulfilling lives, Elliott argues that people may be as much entranced as inspired by their outsourcing of personal decision-making to smart machines.

Review Quotes

"In a passionate yet well-reasoned plea, Elliott urges us to become aware of the far-reaching transformation which the increasing automation of our lives and society has on our selfhood and relations to others. A must read for all ready and willing to break the cycle."
Helga Nowotny, ETH Zurich, former President of the European Research Council

"Anthony Elliott has always been far-seeing about the future of algorithmic thinking, a regime often totemized as 'artificial intelligence'. Now he turns his attention to the way artificial intelligence can sum all of our fears and anxieties, thereby often exacerbating them. Because artificial intelligence is so accessible and yet so inaccessible, it provides each person with expanded psychic resources but at great cost. Unpacking this conundrum is a vital task and Eliott does it with gusto."
Sir Nigel Thrift, former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Warwick

"A very powerful and timely thesis. An outstanding book. Exceptionally original... innovative and thought-provoking."
Luca Possati, Delft University of Technology

"A lucidly written and highly accessible entry point into the social study of algorithms."
Ben Jacobsen, University of York

"The book offers a window to understand a deeply unsettling phenomenon."
Thomas Birtchnell, University of Wollongong

"Elliott's work advances and questions issues connecting algorithmic technologies and intimacy that we as a society are addressing and places them in the context of modern social theory. The book is not an exercise in futurology but an empirically grounded and well-argued theoretical intervention. Elliott takes to heart Wittgenstein's warning against disdain for particular cases and draws throughout the book on the experiences of people in everyday life who use algorithmic technologies to form a mesh of theoretical argument."
Dalibor Stehno, Czech Sociological Review

"As the seasoned AI watcher Prof Anthony Elliott [shows] in Algorithms of Anxiety: Fear in the Digital Age, outsourcing our decision-making to machines and their growing control - how we drive, what we watch or the pace at which we work - is provoking an epidemic of personal anxiety."
Will Hutton, The Guardian

About the Author

Anthony Elliott is Bradley Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of South Australia.