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In their root functions, digital sugar beet systems are designed to yield controllable sucrose profits through the control of mathematical probabilities. Examples include: a standard expectation of discarding 35–40 percent raw sugar beet seeds; an 88 percent accuracy of detecting weeds in a sugar beet field; a 95 percent healthy yield. Computer vision techniques used for assessing and managing sugar beet production function as part of a larger pro- gram to extract probabilistic data from agricultural contexts. This describes a new iteration of an older political agenda to transform agriculture into an algorithmic enterprise.

In this chapter, I put forward a significant precursor to these computer vision systems in the 1920s and 1930s United States when industrial agriculture first became a data-driven enterprise and new statistical control designs were put forward to manage it.

Advancing Climate Justice Priorities Over Profit-Led Research

Through intentional investments and informed divestments, investors, philanthropists, and foundations can support environmentally conscious, community-centered, and reparative approaches to economic and technological change.

Our report intervenes into the currently accelerating water transition by clarifying the political functions of “relief” in COVID-19 water policy agendas through grounded analyses of harmful technological solutions in local contexts throughout North America and Central America. We find that crisis-and-relief water transition policies, and their corresponding technological solutions, work against possibilities for water justice as they do not address the realities of racial capitalism and settler colonialism in water governance.

Logic Magazine

HSNS

This Think Piece situates algorithmic uncertainty as a heightened revival of an earlier social commitment to probabilistic knowing emergent in the interwar period. As a critical site for interdisciplinary exchange, mapping out uncertainty practices and models makes visible the social dimensions and impacts of certainty politics.

PhD thesis, fwiw