Yael Eylat Van-Essen PhD – Curator / Researcher

‘Going Smart’: The Politics and Ethics of Resilient Smart Machines

The dawn of the 21st century has confronted humanity with natural disasters caused by environmental changes, and with a new kinds of global terrorist threats. In order to enhance the resilience of systems which might be confronted in the future with natural or ‘man-made’ disasters, ‘smart’ practices involving sophisticated digital technologies based on big data, have been developed. They operate in real time, integrate data from diverse sources and incorporate applications of artificial intelligence, image processing and advanced communication and sensing technologies.

These new ‘machines’ adopt cybernetic rationality that avoids causality (as well as the need to acknowledge motivations, beliefs and ideologies that shape actual behaviour) and thus, seemingly, deprive from them their ethical dimensions. They give primacy to remote management and elude direct confrontation with problems evolving in real space. In many cases, personal information which is being collected using biometric technologies, is utilized for further physical and cognitive control measures, in military, civil and commercial contexts. Since they are addressed to prevent future threats, they function as a general strategy for managing situations of uncertainty, applying predication practices based on algorithmic and quantitative methods. Such tools produce feedback-loops that can reinforce and deepen states of social inequality and discrimination between populations, while maintaining economic and political interests.

In this paper, with extensive reference to the concepts of resilience and the Anthropocene, and with regard to Foucault’s notion of ‘disciplinary society’ and Gilles Deleuze’s conception of the ‘society of control,’ I examine the political and moral implications of this new type of ‘machine’. Relating to design and art projects in these contexts, I demonstrate how strategies for the prevention of disasters shape the fabric of our daily life, creating new norms, while redefining basic concepts regarding citizenship and governmentality and the relations between man and his environment.