May 23, 2022 – 17:00. Edificio 24 (building 24), aula beta, piano terra (ground floor), Via Golgi 40 

In the age of data-driven algorithms, “governments and corporations will soon know you better than you know yourself”, according to Yuval Noah Harari. In an (in)famous article that played a significant role in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, an algorithm is said to require only 10 ‘likes’ to know you better than a colleague and 70 likes to match your friends. The knowledge algorithms have about us is increasingly being used by government institutions, for instance to determine the chance of someone committing a crime, dropping out of school, or illegitimately receiving social benefits. But do algorithms really ‘know us better’ and if so, in what sense? In this talk, I distinguish between different types of epistemic authority and argue that in an important sense algorithms do not, and cannot, know us better than we know ourselves. Following Miranda Fricker, I suggest that contexts in which algorithms are unjustifiably deferred to, this constitutes a distinct type of epistemic injustice, namely, the injustice of not being treated as a self-knower.