Toward a Critical Technical Practice: Lessons Learned in Trying to Reform AI

By Philip E. Agre. 2006

342 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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Citations in the corpus

Fairness and Abstraction in Sociotechnical Systems (2019, background): “We echo themes of STS scholars such as Lucy Suchman [66], Harry Collins [17], Phil Agre [5], and Diana Forsythe [35]—who in the 1990s critiqued the last wave of artificial intelligence research along similar lines, highlighting that the culture of and modes of knowledge production in computer…”
Decolonial AI: Decolonial Theory as Sociotechnical Foresight in Artificial Intelligence (2020, methodology): “It is exactly this type of framework that was developed by Agre (1997), who described a shift towards a Critical Technical Practice of AI (CTP).”
HCI as heterodoxy: Technologies of identity and the queering of interaction with computers (2011, background): “They cannot easily be interpreted as critical technical practice (Agre, 1997) or reflective design (Sengers et al.”
The Society of Algorithms (2021, background): “Because their formalisms are mathematically provable, the techniques appear universal and removed from the messy world of human politics (Agre 1997, Forsythe & Hess 2001, Ribes et al. 2019).”
Decolonizing Content Moderation: Does Uniform Global Community Standard Resemble Utopian Equality or Western Power Hegemony? (2023, background): “blue collar jobs of low-wage moderators in the Global South—we need to develop a critical technical practice that recognizes power imbalances and implicit values in the design of AI systems [2, 97].”
Do Datasets Have Politics? Disciplinary Values in Computer Vision Dataset Development (2021, unknown): “…the implications of the built environment and its political ramifications [121], while Suchman scrutinized how categorical decisions in system design could hold up specific social orders [113], and Agre criticized approaches to artificial intelligence for un-dervaluing critical social theories [3].”
Data Science as Political Action: Grounding Data Science in a Politics of Justice (2018, unknown): “Additionally, an essential component of developing a more democratic data science is to bring data scientists, technology companies, and governments within the ambit of democratic oversight and accountability[101].”
Human-Computer Insurrection: Notes on an Anarchist HCI (2019, background): “mfortable, but it will be productive nonetheless, both in the esoterictermsofthetechnicalﬁelditselfand intheesoterictermsbywhichweultimately evaluate a technical ﬁeld’s contribution to society." [2] As part of the "third wave" of HCI, our ﬁeld is engaged in an ongoing "turn to th”
Algorithmic realism: expanding the boundaries of algorithmic thought (2020, background): “Philip Agre decried “the false precision of formalism” as “an extremely constricting” cognitive style [1].”
Human-centered Explainable AI: Towards a Reflective Sociotechnical Approach (2020, background): “There are three main affordances of the CTP approach in HCXAI.”
Critical Making: Conceptual and Material Studies in Technology and Social Life (2011, background): “Relevant examples include critical design (Dunne 2005), critical technical practice (Agre 1997), and reﬂective practice (Sengers et al. 2005).”
HistoRAG: Embedding Historical Methodology in Retrieval-Augmented Generation Through Critical Technical Practice (2026, unknown): “Our design philosophy follows Agre’s (1998) concept of Critical Technical Practice.”