As We May Think Now

Algorithms have become ubiquitous in everyday life to the extent that it is almost impossible to operate without them.In the past few years, several articles have been published in Subjectivity offering a critical evaluation of recent developments in artificial intelligence, machine learning and algorithmic governmentality, and the implications of these for culture and society, including a Special Issue on Digital Subjects (https:// link.sprin ger.com/ colle ctions/ fbiaa dacic) in March 2019.In this issue we explore the entanglement of algorithms in the lifeworld.How do algorithms reflect and represent society and culture?Does the literature on subjectivity help us understand what cultural assumptions may be inscribed in algorithms, and how they got there?What kind of social agency is represented by algorithms?How do people make sense of their engagement with algorithms, what do they imagine the algorithms to be/to be doing?And, conversely, how do algorithms make sense of, form and produce them?What can be said about the broader psychosocial implications of algorithms?The popular notion of artificial intelligence is where computers perform clever tasks.We typically overlook the human effort and ingenuity that has gone into this performance-thus when a computer beats a human grandmaster at chess, it doesn't stand modestly on the platform thanking the rest of the team.Anticipating human anxiety about competition from computers, Alan Turing imagined a test that would determine whether an interaction was with a human or a computer: he called it the Imitation Game, we now call it the Turing Test.His first example was to ask a computer to write poetry-specifically a sonnet on the subject of the Forth Bridge.And his idea of a plausible answer for the computer was to say: "Count me out on this one.I never could write poetry" (Turing 1950).At the time of writing this, a chatbot called ChatGPT has attracted a lot of attention as an example of artificial intelligence, and perhaps many people have tested ChatGPT with exactly the same question that Turing imagined.When Jessica Riskin tried it, she was not impressed by its efforts.She found Turing's imaginary machine's answer (Turing imitating a machine imitating a human) infinitely more