Stewardship in the "Age of Algorithms"
Stewardship in the "Age of Algorithms"
复制标题
“算法时代”的管理
作者：
C. Lynch
本文探讨了可以用来记录大型、复杂的社会技术系统(今天通常被称为“算法”)的行为的实用方法，这些系统集中涉及个性化、不透明的规则和机器学习组件的一些混合。植根于传统档案方法的想法--侧重于保存实物和数字物品，或许还包括保护其环境，以便能够随后对物品进行解释或表演--已经完全失败，原因很多，我们必须解决这个问题。这里介绍的方法显然是不完美的、未经验证的、劳动密集型的，而且对目标系统用于决策(包括在相关情况下对结果进行个性化)经常隐藏的因素很敏感；但它们是一个起点，至少概述了它们的局限性。在我们完全理解这里提出的建议的优点和局限性之前，必须探索大量的研究问题。但它代表着一条前进的道路。这基本上是我所知道的第一篇论文，它试图有效地解决我们的社会在所谓的“算法时代”所面临的管理挑战；论文最后讨论了迄今为止未能解决这些挑战的问题，以及与更广泛的管理事业中的其他参与者相比，对档案管理员角色的影响--即捕获现在的记录，并将这一记录以及过去遗留下来的记录传递到未来。我们很可能会看到一群新的文件创造者的出现，他们可能主要是社会科学家和人文主义者，他们走在处理“算法时代”的第一线，他们的材料随后将被送往我们的记忆组织，供我们在未来得到照顾。
This paper explores pragmatic approaches that might be employed to document the behavior of large, complex socio-technical systems (often today shorthanded as “algorithms”) that centrally involve some mixture of personalization, opaque rules, and machine learning components. Thinking rooted in traditional archival methodology — focusing on the preservation of physical and digital objects, and perhaps the accompanying preservation of their environments to permit subsequent interpretation or performance of the objects — has been a total failure for many reasons, and we must address this problem. The approaches presented here are clearly imperfect, unproven, labor-intensive, and sensitive to the often hidden factors that the target systems use for decision-making (including personalization of results, where relevant); but they are a place to begin, and their limitations are at least outlined. Numerous research questions must be explored before we can fully understand the strengths and limitations of what is proposed here. But it represents a way forward. This is essentially the first paper I am aware of which tries to effectively make progress on the stewardship challenges facing our society in the so-called “Age of Algorithms;” the paper concludes with some discussion of the failure to address these challenges to date, and the implications for the roles of archivists as opposed to other players in the broader enterprise of stewardship — that is, the capture of a record of the present and the transmission of this record, and the records bequeathed by the past, into the future. It may well be that we see the emergence of a new group of creators of documentation, perhaps predominantly social scientists and humanists, taking the front lines in dealing with the “Age of Algorithms,” with their materials then destined for our memory organizations to be cared for into the future.