Luciana Parisi: The Incomputable Horizon of Automated Thinking

Abstract

With algorithmic computer-based processing, a new form of numeric reality has come to dominate culture. Algorithmic processing is not only a source for calculation but also a generative elaboration of numbers that involves a capacity of extrapolating patterns from the flux of infinite or, one could say, unstructured information. In other words, the tendency of computation is to determine its incomputable horizon and thus include the uncertainty of the future in the structuring of the present. The paper will discuss how automated systems area already demonstrating that to collect, store and select information cannot occur without including the fallibility of reasoning. 

Bio

Luciana Parisi is Reader in Cultural Theory, the chair of the Ph.D. program at the Centre for Cultural Studies, and co-director of the Digital Culture Unit at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research is a philosophical investigation of technology in culture, aesthetics and politics. She has written within the field of media philosophy and computational design and is the author of Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Biotechnology and the Mutations of Desire (2004, Continuum Press) and Contagious Architecture. Computation, Aesthetics and Space (2013, MIT Press). She is currently researching the philosophical consequences of logical thinking in machines.