Aaron Mendon-Plasek
Resident Fellow
Aaron Mendon-Plasek is a historian of science and technology, a Knight Digital Public Sphere Fellow at the Information Society Project, and Associate Research Scholar at Yale Law School. His work examines how schemes of quantification, including their material, cultural, technical, and institutional instantiations, have been used to imagine, enact, and justify social order. His first book project offers a revisionist history of machine learning, from WWII to the present, that demonstrates how and why it became thinkable and subsequently "reasonable" for learning machines and machine learning strategies, rooted in conceptions of creativity and human judgment, to adjudicate social questions in the 21st century. His dissertation has been supported by a variety of fellowships and grants, including the National Science Foundation, Columbia University, and the Charles Babbage Institute.
He holds a PhD, MPhil, and MA in history from Columbia University, an MA in humanities and social thought from NYU, an MFA in writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a BS in physics and astronomy and a BA in writing from Drake University. He can be contacted at aaron.mendon-plasek@yale.edu.