ABSTRACT
This chapter describes three “biases” of automation: pre-emption, framelessness, and environmentality. There is a specific temporality to pre-emption and an implied epistemology. Pre-emption dispenses with the question of causality: it takes as a given the events it targets, relying on comprehensive monitoring and predictive analytics to stop them in their tracks. “Operationalism” refers to the displacement of narrative accounts and explanations by automated responses. Automated systems do not seek to understand but to act: they are not representational but operational. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault (2007), I describe “environmentality” as a mode of governance that dispenses with processes of subjectification by operating directly on the environment of individual actors, shaping their conduct by intervening in their surrounding milieu. This form of governance relies on comprehensive monitoring combined with the ability to modulate the environment – to treat it as a flexible, programmable context, analogous to that of virtual reality. These “biases” are inter-related, connected as they are by automated systems and practices: they converge upon the attempt to surpass the limitations of the subject by approaching it from different angles.
