Machine's Eye View: Postmodern Data Science and the Politics of Ground Truth

This paper advances the critical analysis of machine learning by placing it in direct relation with actuarial science as a way to further draw out their shared epistemic politics. The social studies of machine learning—along with work focused on other broad forms of algorithmic assessment, prediction, and scoring—tends to emphasize features of these systems that are decidedly actuarial in nature, and even deeply actuarial in origin. Yet, those technologies are almost never framed as actuarial and then fleshed out in that context or with that connection. Through discussions of the production of ground truth and politics of risk governance, I zero in on the bedrock relations of power-value-knowledge that are fundamental to, and constructed by, these technosciences and their regimes of authority and veracity in society. Analyzing both machine learning and actuarial science in the same frame gives us a unique vantage for understanding and grounding these technologies of governance. I conclude this theoretical analysis by arguing that contrary to their careful public performances of mechanical objectivity these technosciences are postmodern in their practices and politics.