Ten - Artificial Intelligence

Summary

The COVID-19 pandemic has been marked by computer modelling and tech solutionism as much as it has by a global lockdown. Tech solutionism is the term for proposals such as proximity-tracking apps and digital immunity passports; the substitution of advanced technology for the proper resourcing of epidemiological responses or open political debate about state priorities. Never mind that fluctuating Bluetooth signals, for example, are a very poor proxy for viral exposure. Technological innovation does the job of diverting attention from questions about underlying material and structural conditions.

The tools to hand for modern states are the infrastructures of surveillance and tracking that already pervade daily life, from smartphones to social media. The pandemic has transformed the tricky balance between commercial surveillance and customer unease. Where corporations previously tried to play down their data collection and Cambridge Analytica was a scandal for its use of data mining and micro-targeted political communications, tech giants can now offer surveillance as a public service. Companies such as Palantir with dubious track records are suddenly in open partnership with national health services and facial recognition start-ups repurpose their tech to do distant readings of your body temperature. And yet these same extractive data logics underpin the wider structures of outsourcing, privatization and precarity that have left societies underprepared for the pandemic itself.

The overall pandemic response is set within a logic of computational modelling and behavioural modification. The imperceptible multiplication of COVID-19 in our cells conspires with data science to produce anticipatory governance, where numerical projections of the future become the rationale for state actions in the present. It is important, in the midst of grief for our losses, not to miss the significance of a governmentality based on algorithmic prediction and preemption. Like surveillance, it was already present prior to the pandemic and is set to become a dominating feature of post-pandemic society, in particular through artificial intelligence (AI).

Abstraction and optimization

AI, meaning the technology of machine learning and neural networks, will become even more important in a post-pandemic society, not least because its core operation is the prediction of risks at scale.