#politics

AI-assisted targeting systems may have allowed the military to target and kill at an unprecedented scale, as international media outlets have reported. However attention to developments on the ground evidences how all the violence was the result of concerted decisions: a prime minister ordering a campaign of destruction and a military echelon eager to heed his demands.

The future lies in recognizing what our machines have finally made visible, and what has perhaps always been there: the socio-political nature of our seemingly natural thoughts and perceptions. Every market crash, every sub-prime mortgage event, reveals the social constructedness and the work—aesthetic, political, economic—it takes to maintain our belief in markets as forces of nature or divinity. And if it is not aesthetically smoothed over through media and narratives of inevitability, they also make it possible to recognize how our machines have linked so many of us together in precarity. The potential politics of these moments has not yet been realized, but there have been efforts, whether in Occupy, or more recently in movements for civil rights, racial equity, and environmental justice such as Black Lives Matter or the Chilean anti-austerity protests of 2019 (to name a few).

For the data and computer sciences, which see themselves as technical disciplines, this is a fundamental dilemma that cannot be solved analytically. Not even by rejecting guard rails entirely. Taking historical data as an unproblematic representation of reality (‘ground truth’) is highly problematic. Every historian knows these problems with archival records. They never speak simply truth but contain the perspectives of their makers. Using data without guardrails would not be any more objective, rather it would mean to automate and thus perpetuate historically evolved forms of privilege and marginalization. This highlights again that we need to apply the aesthetic/normative criteria to understanding these images, which makes them invariably political. For the far right, however, the performative rejection of such guard rails, serves a double purpose. First, by reproducing past discrimination and presenting it as high-tech future, it smoothly aligns with reactionary modernism. Second, by transposing politics to a field of assumed technical objectivity (math never lies!), it renders it nontransparent and beyond question.