HIST 2500 Lecture Notes - Lecture 13: Technological Change, Public Knowledge
Document Summary
Massimo mazzotti"s research interests lie at the intersection of the history of science and science studies. As a historian of science, he has been trained to think of algorithms as sets of instructions for solving certain problems and so as neither glamorous nor threatening. The very word came from arabic and it has to do with algebra. It has to do with algebraic problem-solving techniques. We know that algebra is a very powerful way of talking about things because it"s abstract. It doesn"t depend on the knowledge of the objects that we"re manipulating. I think it"s important to build a foundation how we define an algorithm. It"s something that i think in the technology sphere gets thrown around quite a bit into a messy definition. Algorithms have thus become agents, which is partly why they give rise to so many suggestive metaphors. They determine important aspects of our social reality.
