Anthony Elliott

Algorithms of Anxiety explores the widely held belief that machine learning algorithms promise relief from the crippling burdens of anxiety. The digital revolution is heralded as the dawn of a brave new world where individuals, communities, and organisations can seemingly take control of the future with a level of precision verging on mathematical exactitude. Yet, paradoxically, these algorithms have ushered...

Industrial robots, self-driving cars, customer-service chatbots, and Google’s algorithmic predictions have brought the topic of artificial intelligence into public debate. Why is AI the source of such intense controversy, and what are its economic, political, social, and cultural consequences? Tracing the changing fortunes of artificial intelligence, Elliott develops a systematic account of how automated intelligent machines impact different spheres and...

Artificial intelligence not only powers our cars, hospitals and courtrooms: predictive algorithms are becoming deeply lodged inside us too. Machine intelligence is learning our private preferences and discreetly shaping our personal behaviour, telling us how to live, who to befriend and who to date. In Algorithmic Intimacy, Anthony Elliott examines the power of predictive algorithms in reshaping personal relationships today....

Society is one of the most frequently used words in public life; it is also a foundational term in the social sciences. In our own time, however, the idea has never been so much in dispute and so little understood. For some critics, society is simply too consensual for a world of intensive discord. For others, the idea of society...

In this ground-breaking book, Cambridge-trained sociologist Anthony Elliott argues that much of what passes for conventional wisdom about artificial intelligence is either ill-considered or plain wrong. The reason? The AI revolution is not so much about cyborgs and super-robots in the future, but rather massive changes in the here-and-now of everyday life. In The Culture of AI, Elliott explores how...

This new, updated edition provides a lively, lucid and compelling introduction to contemporary controversies over the self and self-identity in the social sciences and humanities. In an accessible and concise format, the book ranges from classical intellectual traditions of symbolic interactionism, psychoanalysis and Foucauldian theory, through feminism and postfeminism, to postmodernism and the mobilities paradigm. With characteristic verve and clarity,...