Algorithms are social agents. This requires a powerful and flexible concept of communication.

What is it about?

Discourses about smart algorithms and digital social agents still refer primarily to the construction of artificial intelligences that reproduce the faculties of individuals. Recent developments, however, show that algorithms are more efficient when they abandon this goal and try instead to reproduce the ability to communicate. Algorithms, that do not think like people, can affect the ability to obtain and process information in society. Referring to the concept of communication of Niklas Luhmann's theory of social systems, the paper critically reconstructs the debate on the computational turn of big data as artificial reproduction not of intelligence but of communication. Self-learning algorithms parasitically take advantage of the (conscious or unaware) contribution of web users to create a "virtual double contingency". This provides society with information that was not thought by anyone, but enters the communication circuit and raises its complexity. The concept of communication should be reconsidered to take account of these developments, including or not the possibility of communicating with algorithms.

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