Waving at the Machines

For years we’ve been promised a future of jetpacks, flying cars and living on other planets: a vision of the digital age that has endured since the 1950s. But in fact a new future has been growing beside it all along, a future of cheap satellite imagery, digital real estate, narrow AI and 5.5 billion network eyes. As we digitise all of our culture—the books that we read, the music that we listen to—and our view of the world itself, we render it robot-readable, computational, comprehensible to another nature. James will discuss the architecture of datacenters, the subjectivity of Google Street View, and the pixelation of everything, in an attempt to calibrate our new position in the world.