fields

Measuring our demise

Oh Melbourne, three parallel events that spanned the week: RMIT College of Design and Social Context’s Australian Posthuman Summer Laboratory the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society and ACMI FACT

So the first of a couple of posts that connect some dots.

First, the roundtable with Orit Halpern and in conversation with Janet Roitman and Fabio Mattioli and myself, examining how ‘resilience’ has become a central concept in our approach to AI and climate crisis. Orit carefully shifted focus on to the troubling shift from sustainability to resilience – and the emerging narrative that suggests that we are no longer trying to prevent crisis but instead accept it as a permanent state that requires constant technological management (and in turn selling smart cities as the solution). She terms this “pessimistic computational optimism” – acknowledging problems while assuming more computing power will manage them, even as this very computation contributes to the crisis it claims to solve.

This theme resonated with the inaugural “No Harm Done” event at ACMI, where speakers: Ingrid Mason, Linda Matthews and Tobias Revell who was introduced by Dr Bree Trevena, introduced provocations that highlighted the challenge of designing ethical AI futures. Followed by the Playing with Future cards with Larissa Hjorth and team.

Both events exposed the dangerous gap between technological promises and reality, and the unsettling performative nature of technological solutions. Smart cities market “resilience” while enabling dispossession and surveillance, while AI systems are “performed” through carefully constructed demonstrations of “magic” that mask their limitations and risks. From Singapore’s digital twin that prioritises data centres access to water (away from the publics that it is mirroring) during droughts, to the proliferation of AI-powered surveillance cameras reshaping our cities, we see technology being deployed not to solve problems, but to manage and monitor their effects.

Cultural institutions are struggling with this shift, caught between preserving our past and confronting a digital future that threatens to fundamentise how we understand and transmit culture. The move from sustainability to resilience reflects a deeper surrender, an admission that we’re no longer trying to prevent crisis, but merely survive it through data management.

Have we already accepted defeat in our ability to transform, settling instead for building tech that measures our ability to survive?

thank you to wonderful folks at ACMI & of course the No Harm Done team Bonnie Shaw Natasha Dwyer Lisa M. Given (FASSA, FASIST) Dr Bree Trevena Dan Hill Jathan Sadowski and Seb Chan will be back for NHD #2 soon.

#AI hashtag#Ethics hashtag#RegenerativeFutures hashtag#DigitalTransformation hashtag#Sustainability hashtag#Resilience