notes from ramon amaro’s: machine learning, surveillance and the politics of visibility
- the complexity of quantifying ambition is a single matter on its own
- how to be made visible and the consequences thereof
- normalised spectrum of data, data that is regressed or clean to reduce noise or contingencies
- taking for granted that ai is some type of abstraction and not connected to the social, political and economic realities of the world we live in (it is)
- mediation of those social constructs through the function of symbolic mathematics
- without the mediation it is believed that machine learning (especially facial recognition analysis) can produce insights into processes and behaviours that were previously unseen or unrealised
- also illuminating individual and collective behaviours
- hoped that these insights might materialise into new ways of seeing the previously unseen
- thought to close perceived gaps between assigned objectives and efficient operation
- new questions are being raised, like can an algorithm be racist?
- what do these types of computational biases reveal about our current understandings of one another including our ingrained social codes and perceptions
- how we reconcile a future that includes data with the literal weight of a potential loss of aspirations
- what we might consider algorithmic bias is based on the fundamental principals of mathematics
- already predicated on the reduction of chance and contingency namely to regress, to clean and to normalise the unexpected and therefore normalise and exclude the opportunities outside of the lines of political engagement
- the attempt to reduce probabilities for bias takes for granted the people who want to remain unseen by people in power
- a world that cannot be systemised cannot be captured
- we have a mechanism itself that is predicated on the exclusion of marginalised bodies, in making that space more exclusive we are revealing the functions of life that may actually serve as the only container for safety in those same populations
- politics of choice and visibility, the question is, what consequences are incurred when the aspirations of the individual differ from the ambitions from normalised social, political, and economic routines
- what will be the impact of technologies that can mediate either interest using the same computational gaze
- symbolic mathematics enact itself a dynamic and two-way system of being seen and visible as well as individual and unseen depending upon the system or those that are perceiving the system
- quantum mechanics in itself is a particularly racialised space that can live in two simultaneous moments of reality and simulation
- where do the corporeal bodies sit within the relationship when the simulation of ourselves is actually at odds with our own inspirations and aspirations
- not a relationship between a body and an institution but rather a body against itself
- emerging difference between the simulation of ones perceived place in this world and the circumstances that inform their current aspirations