Resumen de Toward the Elimination of Subjectivity: From Francis Bacon to AI

Joseph E. Davis

• The ardent embrace and imposition of algorithms, AI, and other technologies of quantification cannot be explained by their instrumental value or actual productivity. Their appeal is rooted in deeper commitments, moral and philosophical, that have been playing out over the whole course of modernity. These commitments—to achieve certainty and “objective” knowledge for the sake of human enhancement and social harmony—have been conveyed in both science and administration in a mode of representation and language of numbers that effaces persons and their subjectivity. Algorithms and AI represent these ethical and epistemological ideals in their purest form yet.