artificial intelligence the eclipse of human discretion

ESSAY  text by ADAM GREENFIELD artwork by YNGVE HOLEN American writer and urbanist Adam Greenfield focuses on technology (Artificial Intelligence, blockchain, surveillance, etc.) and its intersection with design and culture. Taken together, the practical efforts we’ve discussed in this book — the massive undertakings of data collection and analysis, the representation of the world in models of ever-increasing resolution and sophistication, and the development of synthetic discretion — have a distinct directionality to them. As groups of people, each acting for their own reasons, bring these discrete capabilities together and fuse them in instrumental ensembles, we finally and suddenly arrive at the place where we must have known we were headed all along: the edge of the human. We have hauled up at the shores of a general artificial intelligence, competent to take up the world as it is, derive meaning from its play of events, and intervene in its…