Current

‘A Game That is Not a Game’: The Sublime Limit of Human Intelligence and AI Through Go–Kwasu Tembo

This article will attempt to theorize some of the subtle aspects of the technological sublime and in so doing speculate as to some of its future consequences. Using the 2016 five-match Go tournament which pitted AlphaGo software (an AI developed by Google/Deepmind) against Lee Sedol, an 18-time world champion Go master, my central line of argument is the idea that moves made by AlphaGo that initially appeared to be counterintuitive or even erroneous from a human perspective, might in fact reveal 'in(super)human' intelligence.

Intelligent Borders? Securitizing Smartphones in the European Border Regime–Michelle Pfeifer

The discursive and political narration of intelligent borders is central for the socio-technical renderings of data-driven border and migration policing. In this article, I analyze the implementation of data-driven and semi-automated technologies to authenticate and recognize asylum seekers' identities and claims in the context of asylum administration and migration control in Germany, with a particular focus on the practice of forensic smartphone data extraction.

What Personalisation Can Do for You! Or: How to Do Racial Discrimination Without ‘Race’–Thao Phan & Scott Wark

The story of Facebook’s ‘ethnic affinity’ categories exemplifies emerging techniques of racialisation today. It is our contention that such techniques operationalise a function that is inherent to algorithmic culture, namely: discrimination. The quiet demise of the categories is supposed to have brought one particularly ignominious chapter in Facebook’s recent history to a close. However, we contend that these categories typify the techniques that platforms like Facebook use to assemble us into groups and, reciprocally, to apprehend us as individuals.

In Other Words: Smart Compose and the Consequences of Writing in the Age of AI–Crystal Chokshi

In this paper, I lean into debates and concepts surrounding media as extractive technology as a way into other debates altogether: the history, technologies, and consequences of writing. Combining scholarly work on the topics of critical media studies, critical algorithm studies, platform studies, and linguistic capitalism, I contextualize the current moment in this history, elaborating how platforms and AI shift ‘the semantic coordinates’ (Striphas 2015: 398) of what it means to write.

Optimal Brain Damage: Theorizing our Nervous Present–Johannes Bruder & Orit Halpern

The neural imaginary is the idea that populations of neurons can be aligned with the behavior of populations of humans, and that models which abstract from the nature of a population’s elements can explain such seemingly incomparable phenomena as learning, financial crises, and the spread of a virus during the current pandemic. As we hope to demonstrate, the seemingly dated and insignificant neural imaginary thus has enormous impact on the future management of planetary populations and life through technological means, for it suggests transferring knowledge about how the brain protects itself against the effects of information overload to neural networks and societies.

Guest Editors’ Introduction

This special issue thus offers historical perspectives, conceptual re-thinking and situated analyses of the technical realities and the social and cultural implications of machine intelligence, in its many different forms and manifestations, with the hope that this will provide opportunities to intervene in and change the course of our technological futures.