The Non-Human Standpoint

The world is living with a tiring paradox today: the perspective of the non-human is validated as never before after AI has been widely embraced as the new ‘engine of change’. But at the same time, anti-environmental attitudes are ascending and seem to be only amplified, consolidated, and fed by the embrace of machine intelligence. How to break this coupling of two contradictory validations through ‘AI’, of the non-human perspective with withdrawal from the world? The collaborative project, ‘AI in the street’ moved into city streets to explore a different logic of activating the non-human standpoint, and this in the following ways. Walking the street, the researchers encountered AI first and foremost as a barrier to interaction, in the form of oversized 5G antenna, cluttered lampposts, and opaque road furniture. But they also encountered hesitating machines, demonstrating that technology is humbled by contingency no less than any other entity and breaking the spell of mechanical objectivity. Finally, adopting the non-human vantagepoint of the street opened up a critical perspective : assuming the vantage point of a tree, but also of a thistle, the researchers could suddenly see what technology disables, the sheer inhabitability of the place. At the same time, the time frame expanded, into what was here before and might be, what grows through the cracks.

Noortje Marres’ work contributes to the interdisciplinary field of Science, Technology and Society (STS) and investigates issues at the intersection of innovation, publics, the environment and everyday life. Trained in the sociology and philosophy of science and technology, she has led research projects focused on emergent forms of public engagement in technological societies, in work on sustainable living and related practices of ‘material participation’ such as everyday carbon accounting, and more recently, automated and connected environments created in city streets. Noortje has also contributed to methods development across social research, digital media and activism, in work on online issue mapping and situational analytics. Her current research focuses on experiments ‘beyond the laboratory’, examining diverse forms of testing in societal settings – street trials of intelligent vehicles, fact-checks in media environments and Covid testing situations – as critical interfaces between science, engineering, nature and society. Much of her work, then, is concerned with experiments in society as forms of knowledge, intervention and engagement that are gaining fresh relevance in our compute-intensive, ecologically challenged age.