The Power of the Humanities in the Age of the Algorithm
December 19, 2016
Stating that “algorithms can do many things but they will never actually give a damn,” consultant Madsbjerg has a bone to pick with American society’s reliance on algorithms and big data. This trend is coming, he warns, at the cost of a devaluation of human judgement. Meanwhile, humanities departments are declining because of the greater interest in engineering and the natural sciences, based on the misleading premise that a liberal art degree dooms the graduate to a lower salary. The effect, Madsbjerg says, is to create a generation of data-focused thinkers. Madsbjerg recommends shifting reliance to “thick data,” which layers spreadsheet data with ethnographic data—the titular process of sense making. The directive to take a wide-angle view of problems is valid and the argument is strong, but the book overall has a paranoid, somewhat histrionic tone, railing against “scientism, or the belief that the hard sciences and abstracted data sets devoid of context—‘big data’—are the only valid means to explain all phenomena that exists in the world.” Madsbjerg’s premise is reasonable, but not enough to base a full book on.