Selected books
Kommunikation mit unverständlichen Maschinen
Are ChatGPT and generative AI a threat or an opportunity for our civilisation? The latest algorithms, which seem to be getting smarter and smarter, are intervening in every aspect of our lives - and are becoming increasingly difficult for humans to understand. Should we be worried - and are we worried about the right things? How can we control machines that we don't understand? When the focus of AI shifts from intelligence to communication, completely different questions arise: since algorithms no longer try to reproduce human intelligence, they have learnt to become increasingly competent and efficient communication partners. Now it is up to us to learn how to communicate with them.
Esposito, E. Kommunikation mit unverständlichen Maschinen. Wien-Salzburg: Residenz Verlag, 2024.
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Explaining Machines: Social Management of Incomprehensible Algorithms
Editor of the symposium in Sociologica, 16(3), 2022.
The contributions published in this symposium [...] address the broad spectrum of questions that the management of incomprehensible machines poses to the social sciences. For example, how should the legal right to an explanation be interpreted, if the fundamental condition of contestability of decisions requires a legal justification of the outcome of black box machine learning systems that is different from a technical explanation (Hildebrandt, 2022)? What form of normativity is implied by opaque technical systems that performatively act on their environment (Rieder et al., 2022)? Is it still possible, and how, to criticize the operation of algorithms when the number of variables and the complexity of procedures make it impossible for designers to project a hypothesis space that connects the input data (observed space) and the results of the calculation (decision space) (John-Mathews & Cardon, 2022)? Dealing with highly efficient machines that are inherently incomprehensible, does the requirement of explainability make it necessary to reduce their performance, or does the sociological analysis allow for the separation of explainability from the demand for transparency (Esposito, 2022b)? And in general, should the inexplicability of algorithms be considered a failure, or can their ability to find patterns in the randomness of data rather be an opportunity to revise our notion of control and recognize the role of accidents and of the particular (Weinberger, 2022)?
Text from: Esposito, E. Explaining Machines: Social Management of Incomprehensible Algorithms. Introduction. Sociologica, 16(3), 2022: 1–4. https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1971-8853/16265
Artificial Communication: How Algorithms Produce Social Intelligence
A proposal that we think about digital technologies such as machine learning not in terms of artificial intelligence but as artificial communication.
Algorithms that work with deep learning and big data are getting so much better at doing so many things that it makes us uncomfortable. How can a device know what our favorite songs are, or what we should write in an email? Have machines become too smart? In Artificial Communication, Elena Esposito argues that drawing this sort of analogy between algorithms and human intelligence is misleading. If machines contribute to social intelligence, it will not be because they have learned how to think like us but because we have learned how to communicate with them. Esposito proposes that we think of “smart” machines not in terms of artificial intelligence but in terms of artificial communication.
To do this, we need a concept of communication that can take into account the possibility that a communication partner may be not a human being but an algorithm—which is not random and is completely controlled, although not by the processes of the human mind. Esposito investigates this by examining the use of algorithms in different areas of social life. She explores the proliferation of lists (and lists of lists) online, explaining that the web works on the basis of lists to produce further lists; the use of visualization; digital profiling and algorithmic individualization, which personalize a mass medium with playlists and recommendations; and the implications of the “right to be forgotten.” Finally, she considers how photographs today seem to be used to escape the present rather than to preserve a memory.
Esposito, E. Artificial Communication: How Algorithms Produce Social Intelligence. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2022.
Other Languages
Italian: Comunicazione artificiale. Come gli algoritmi producono l'intelligenza sociale. Milano: Bocconi University Press, 2022.
Chinese: 人工沟通：算法如何生产社会智能 by Weng Zhuangzhuang. Shanghai: Shanghai Jiaotong University Press, 2023.
Endorsements
“An innovative look at artificial intelligence that does not seek to oppose the intelligence of humans against that of machines, but rather explores the variety of communications between our societies and artifacts that do not reason like us but have learned to know us.” – Dominique Cardon, Professor of Sociology and Director of the Médialab at Sciences Po Paris.
"Elena Esposito’s book doesn’t just serve as a corrective for labeling algorithms as “intelligent.” Artificial Communication critically undermines and expands how we think about AI on the most fundamental levels. It helps us move away from assumptions that computers and technology are always correct, or that they even could be. Viewing AI primarily as a type of communication helps us retain humancentric thinking, even when powerful technologies are employed." – Paul J. D'Ambrosio, Professor of Chinese Philosophy at East China Normal University in Shanghai. (Full review)
The Future of Futures. The Time of Money in Financing and Society
This book reconstructs the dynamics of economics, beginning explicitly with the role and the relevance of time: money uses the future in order to generate present wealth. Financial markets sell and buy risk, thereby binding the future. Elena Esposito explains that complex risk management techniques of structured finance produce new and uncontrolled risks because they use a simplified idea of the future, failing to account for how the future reacts to attempts at controlling it. During the recent financial crisis, the future had already been used (through securitizations, derivatives and other tools) to the extent that we had many futures, but no open future available.
Esposito, E. The Future of Futures. The Time of Money in Financing and Society. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2011.
Other Languages
German translation: Die Zukunft der Futures. Die Zeit des Geldes in Finanzwelt und Gesellschaft. Heidelberg: Carl Auer , 2010.
Original Italian edition: Il futuro dei futures. Il tempo del denaro nella finanza e nella società. Pisa: ETS, 2009.
Endorsements
“Time is enigmatic. So is finance. The Future of Futures is about both and it argues that a social theory of time is needed to make finance organization and management less clumsy. With the development of this theory, the book is an important contribution for both scholars of the growing field of finance studies and those that are interested in better understanding issues such as temporarily and uncertainty in organizations. ” – Christian Frankel and José Ossandón, Copenhagen Business School (Full review)
Die Fiktion der wahrscheinlichen Realität
In her new book, the Italian sociologist Elena Esposito takes as her starting point the parallelism between modern fiction and probability theory, both of which developed at the end of the 17th century. The basic thesis of the book is that both are modern forms of doubling reality that react to changes in society. Fiction develops as an explicitly invented, alternative reality that nevertheless contributes to the understanding and experience of all members of society. Probability and statistics, on the other hand, are fictions related to the present future that make it possible to make decisions in the present that give rise to future presences - which will then be different from what was previously thought.
Esposito, E. Die Fiktion der wahrscheinlichen Realität. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp 2007.
Die Verbindlichkeit des Vorübergehenden: Paradoxien der Mode
One of the peculiarities of modern society is its tendency to take something temporary as a fixed point of reference, precisely in the knowledge of its fleeting nature. Fashion is exemplary here: what is ‘in’ does not claim to be beautiful, sensible or interesting, but only to be fashionable. It appeals, even though or precisely because we know that it will soon be ‘out’ and no longer appealing. What's more, when it comes to fashion, you don't want to imitate a model, you want to affirm your own individuality, even though you know that everyone else is doing the same. You behave like the others in order to be different and to show this publicly.
Esposito, E. Die Verbindlichkeit des Vorübergehenden: Paradoxien der Mode. Suhrkamp: Frankfurt a.M., 2004.
Soziales Vergessen. Formen und Medien des Gedächtnisses der Gesellschaft
Our society has lost the traditional sense of memory of ancient and pre-modern societies: the idea that memory - even more fundamentally than the preservation of individual memories - serves to give order to the cosmos and to provide guidelines for thought and action.
The forms and strength of this memory are related to the available communication media: from writing to the mass media and the latest electronic technologies. These media, which allow much more to be remembered and forgotten, require increasingly complex social structures. But what are the characteristics of the memory of our computerised technical society? How much must it be able to forget in order to retain orientation in a chaotic and self-referential world, i.e. to be able to remember?
Extended German translation: Esposito, E. Soziales Vergessen. Formen und Medien des Gedächtnisses der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp 2002.
Other Languages
Original ltalian edition: Esposito, E. La memoria sociale. Mezzi per comunicare e modi di dimenticare. Roma-Bari: Laterza, 2001.
GLU: Glossar zu Niklas Luhmann
Luhmann's theory is fascinating and complex. It offers incomparably enlightening insights, references and research opportunities, but reveals its utility only after a quite high competence threshold. Using the reticular form of the glossary, this book makes the theory accessible while maintaining its complexity. Without being obstructed by knowledge gaps or by references to concepts presented elsewhere, readers inside and outside sociology get the required support to explore sociological systems theory and to engage with it. Luhmann himself, in his introduction, praises the form of the glossary to cope with the challenges of the theoretical description of our highly complex society.
Baraldi, C, Corsi, G, Esposito, E. GLU. Glossar zu Niklas Luhmanns Theorie sozialer Systeme. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a.M., 1997.
Other Languages
Original Italian edition: Baraldi, C, Corsi, G, Esposito, E. Luhmann In Glossario. Milano: Angeli, 1995.
English: Baraldi, C, Corsi, G, Esposito, E. Unlocking Luhmann. A Keyword Introduction to Systems Theory. Bielefeld, Transcript, 2021.