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.
