Technology does not emerge from a vacuum. Rather, it is the reification of a particular set of beliefs and desires: the congruent, if unconscious dispositions of its creators. In any moment it is assembled from a toolkit of ideas and fantasies developed over generations, through evolution and culture, pedagogy and debate, endlessly entangled and enfolded. The very idea of criminality itself is a legacy of nineteenth-century moral philosophy, while the neural networks used to ‘infer it’ are, as we’ve seen, the product of a specific worldview – the apparent separation of the mind and the world,
...more
