Updating the Human Algorithm

“Updating the Human Algorithm”
Los Angeles Review of Books

For Remote Intervention, a Los Angeles Review of Books/Berggruen Institute dossier co-edited by Mashinka Firunts Hakopian and Medaya Ocher

From the Essay:

We can think of “the human” as an algorithmic function correlated to a specific set of terms and outcomes.

From its inception, this algorithm has been designed to retrieve certain results while suppressing others, trained by a narrow coterie of developers on datasets that reinforce patterns of exclusion and structural violence.

The algorithmic logic of “the human” is predictive: it purports to neutrally forecast the future while scripting it in advance. In this respect, the radical uncertainties of the present offer an opening. A space of rupture where we might encode alternative conceptions of the human and of (co)presence — where we might retrieve unforeseen outcomes.

Image: Nancy Baker Cahill, Hollow Point 103, animate¤d VR still, 2017