Annotated Bibliography
I started this annotated bibliography as a private document to keep an account of my literature review for this project. Over time, it has developed into a handy little resource that I hope others can also find useful. All citations follow the Chicago Manual of Style (16th edition). Most citations have my notes — short description about the resource along with a personal reflection on how I engaged with and found it useful.
Understanding Transparency
Arthur, P. J. “The Lost Innocence of Transparency in Environmental Politics.” Transparency in Global Environmental Governance, 2014, 39–60. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9780262027410.003.0002.
Arthur assesses the achievements of transparency in environmental effectiveness and concludes that markets and states jostle to capture transparency arrangements for their own diverse ends.
Alloa, Emmanuel. “Transparency: A Magic Concept of Modernity.” Transparency, Society and Subjectivity, 2018, 21–55. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77161-8_3.
Alloa dismisses the discourse of transparency as a means of achieving self-coincidence, unicity and self-stability, but sees it as diaphaneity.
Fenster, Mark. “The Opacity of Transparency.” SSRN Electronic Journal, 2005. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.686998.
Fenster elegantly articulates the problem statement around transparency as a simplistic model of linear communication that assumes that information, once set free from the state that creates it, will produce an informed, engaged public that will hold officials accountable. I was particularly taken by Section III (B) where the discernibility and transmissibility of the Message (the content of to be made transparent) is disputed.
Filgueiras, Fernando. “Transparency and Accountability: Principles and Rules for the Construction of Publicity.” Journal of Public Affairs 16, no. 2 (2015): 192–202. https://doi.org/10.1002/pa.1575.
Fisher, E. “Transparency and Administrative Law: A Critical Evaluation.” Current Legal Problems 63, no. 1 (2010): 272–314. https://doi.org/10.1093/clp/63.1.272.
This paper looks at the intersection between transparency and administrative law and argues that transparency mechanisms are not just tools for administrative lawyers but also extend the province of the subject, contribute to its architecture, and provide new sources of conflict and dispute. I particularly like the four part definition of transparency here and the grounding of transparency in making the exercise of power visible.
Florini, A. (2000). The end of secrecy. Power and Conflict in the Age of Transparency, 13–28. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230107397_2.
Ann Florini described the transparency ideal as one end of the continuum as the polar opposite of the secrecy ideal, with international consensus rapidly shifting towards it. She makes a convincing case for transparency emerging as a normative default across a range of initiatives—international inspection programmes for weapons, freedom of information regulations to demystify politics, need for timely information in free markets.
Pozen, David E. “Seeing Transparency More Clearly.” Public Administration Review 80, no. 2 (2019): 326–31. https://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13137.
The paper laments the ubiquitous presence of transparency as both a solution to and cause behind several public policy problems. It argues that transparency lacks a coherent normative ideal and must require a sociological turn where specific legal, institutional, historical, political, and cultural contexts need to be examined. Pozen is very vocal against the sweeping, seductive nature of both transparency fetishism and formalism.
Schudson, Michael. The Rise of the Right to Know: Politics and the Culture of Transparency, 1945-1975. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2018.
Wall, Steven P. “Public Justification and the Transparency Argument.” The Philosophical Quarterly 46, no. 185 (1996): 501. https://doi.org/10.2307/2956360.
The paper deals with John Rawls’ transparency argument — that in a well ordered society the publicity condition must be fully satisfied — and the three possible contours of the publicity condition which are accessibility, understandability and acceptability.
Human v. AI Thinking
Part personal and philosophical, a mellow Garry Kasparov reflects on his 1997 defeat to Deep Blue. Kasparov sounds like a spokesperson for technological determinism for much of the book, but his detailed account of the experience of playing a computer using brute force methods is illuminating.
Kasparov, Garry. Deep Thinking. Hodder, 2018.
Laird, John E., Christian Lebiere, and Paul S. Rosenbloom. “A Standard Model of the Mind: Toward a Common Computational Framework across Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Science, Neuroscience, and Robotics.” AI Magazine 38, no. 4 (2017): 13–26. https://doi.org/10.1609/aimag.v38i4.2744.
This builds on the key foundational hypothesis in artificial intelligence is that minds are computational entities, and makes an ambitious attempt at conceptualising a standard model for computational thinking drawing from cognitive science, neuroscience, and robotics.
Levesque, Hector J. Common Sense, the Turing Test, and the Quest for Real AI. MIT Press, 2018.
This book explains the assumption that much of philosophical impetus of the field of AI is based on—that ordinary thinking, the kind that people engage in every day, is also a computational process, and one that can be studied without too much regard for who or what is doing the thinking.
Minsky, Marvin. The Society of Mind. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 1988.
Minsky proposes a scheme called Society of Mind — the mind is made of thoughtless agents that can only do simple things on its own. But if these agents get organized into societies, they can give rise to intelligence. He run throughs various ideas—biological, developmental, behavioral, and psychological.
Neumann, Von John. The Computer and the Brain. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959.