In Cloud Ethics Louise Amoore examines how machine learning algorithms are transforming the
ethics and politics of contemporary society. Conceptualizing algorithms as ethicopolitical
entities that are entangled with the data attributes of people Amoore outlines how algorithms
give incomplete accounts of themselves learn through relationships with human practices and
exist in the world in ways that exceed their source code. In these ways algorithms and their
relations to people cannot be understood by simply examining their code nor can ethics be
encoded into algorithms. Instead Amoore locates the ethical responsibility of algorithms in
the conditions of partiality and opacity that haunt both human and algorithmic decisions. To
this end she proposes what she calls cloud ethics-an approach to holding algorithms
accountable by engaging with the social and technical conditions under which they emerge and
operate.
