The Indefinite Article: Anxiety and the Essence of Artificial Intelligence

The Indefinite Article: Anxiety and the Essence of Artificial Intelligence focuses on the implications of technological surveillance for human being and ethics. It shows that human privacy is fragile and susceptible to coercion by both visible and invisible social forces realized by any artificial intelligence that formalizes and universalizes human behavioral characteristics in order to construct personalities. These patterns cannot be resisted with traditional notions of individual liberty and respect for human dignity. The way through lies in the same anxious questioning that drives publicly oriented persons to welcome boundaries that are inscribed upon them as identities under conditions of mass surveillance. The invasion of private life by data collection mechanisms forces the socially constructed subject to imagine itself alone under a microscope. Roth carefully demonstrates how this dystopia can be inverted through a critical inquiry that glares back at the lenses of that power.