B. Latour’s scientific contributions

What is this page?


This page lists works of an author who doesn't have a ResearchGate profile or hasn't added the works to their profile yet. It is automatically generated from public (personal) data to further our legitimate goal of comprehensive and accurate scientific recordkeeping. If you are this author and want this page removed, please let us know.

Publications (1)


Morality and technology: The end of the means
  • Article

October 2002

·

3,333 Reads

·

230 Citations

B. Latour

Technology is always limited to the realm of means, while morality is supposed to deal with ends. In this theoretical article about comparing those two regimes of enunciation, it is argued that technology is on the contrary characterized by the 'ends of means' that is the impossibility of being limited to tools; technical artefacts are never tools if what is meant by this is a transmission of function in a mastered way. Once this modification of the meaning of technology is accepted, then it is possible to relate technology, in a totally different way, to morality which is not about values, but about the exploration of ends.

Citations (1)


... To do so, we explore how different understandings of ML-based systems as black boxes produce different assemblages of what is constitutive of the black box (and hence needs to be researched) and what resides outside. Those entities that are considered constitutive elements of the inner workings of an algorithmic black box can be understood through the notion of the "fold" (Introna, 2007;Latour, 2002;Lee et al., 2019). The fold describes the ways in which algorithmic systems produce proximities between social groups, times or locations by relating ( folding) them algorithmically-how social actors, temporalities, places, imaginaries, practices, and values are enfolded in algorithmic regimes. ...

Reference:

5. Reassembling the Black Box of Machine Learning : Of Monsters and the Reversibility of Foldings
Morality and technology: The end of the means
  • Citing Article
  • October 2002