American airport security faces the challenge of screening passengers with ever-more-sophisticated security measures without adding delays. A growing number of airports have turned to artificial intelligence as a solution to quickly target threats. In addition to traditional scans for restricted items, artificial intelligence security is also beginning to include behavioral biometrics, such as facial expressions and other body language, to detect threats in a person’s conduct.
This presentation proposes that digital gatekeepers, in the form of algorithms independently operating as extensions of the state, have emerged as a powerful apparatus to interpellate neoliberal subjectivities. This marks a core shift from human to machine hailing defined by the impersonalized and approximated reality of algorithmic decision-making.
As Luciana Parisi has posited, algorithms are capable of “speculative reason,” with the power to effect a reality that transcends any initial human inputs. The potential of such a world is that human cognition will become the nondominant Other as algorithms create digital norms that become boundaries, and ultimately interpellate the humans that digitally cross them as trespassers.
This paper will utilize Luciana Parisi and Patricia Ticineto Clough’s work on algorithmic cognition and Maurizio Lazzarato’s theories of social subjection and machinic enslavement. This paper will also draw on Louis Althusser’s concept of hailing by the state ideological apparatus to ask, what are the implications for human subjectivity and cultural compliance as we move to primarily algorithmic decision-making?
About the presenterNeil Ripley
Neil Ripley is a marketing communications executive pursuing an MSc in Marketing from King’s College London. His research focuses on artificial intelligence, brand affinity, and the production of desire. He is a former researcher and breaking news editor at Congressional Quarterly and studied political science at Eastern Michigan University.