Should algorithms decide? What is the impact of algorithmic bias? Key social and personal decisions that impact our lives are increasingly guided by algorithms. S0rt1ng Me S0rt1ng You explores the social and ethical implications of the increasing ubiquity of algorithms, or algorithmic governance (algocracy), in the light of existentialism and extinctialism (e.g. to generate new forms of knowledge inaccessible for human intelligence as a necessity to survive).

Algorithms themselves are relatively benign and easy to understand. It is only the systems through which they are created and implemented that sometimes give rise to problems. In our contemporary digital and data driven information age, algorithms are the foundation of the digital network, blockchain, IoT, AI and robotics. It is not impossible that, in the future, every decision that mankind makes is going to be informed by cognitive systems, like AI’s and a zoo of different algorithms. They could create bias or eliminate implicit bias from social decision-making.

The artist is using sorting algorithms to reorganise a large number of items into some specific order such as highest to lowest, or vice-versa. The most common example we experience every day is sorting clothes or other items on an e-commerce website either by lowest-price to highest, or list by popularity, or some other order.

Digital Art by Frederik De Wilde, @studio_de.wilde | Video MP4 | Sound | 1920x 2160 | 10/1 |