Research Projects

“Liberty, Equality, and “Fraternity”: A History of Automating Decision Making

(on-going/support HORIZONS EU Grant) 

This project will examine a genealogy of ideas concerning decision making, technology, freedom, and evolution in post 1970’s economics, the human and life sciences, and finance. Heuristically borrowing from the motto of the French and Haitian States, I intend to trace the reformulation of categories fundamental to liberalism and liberal economic thinking through technologies of machine learning and artificial intelligence.  The central argument is that beginning in the 1970’s a combination of economic theory and financialization, shifts in models of nature, evolution, and environment, and transformations in understandings of cognition and neuro-science merged to reorganize ideas of intelligence. Intelligence began to be understood as networked, self-organizing, and dispersed into the environment. Markets (and later digital social networks) came to be understood as the only mechanisms that could coordinate decision making at scale. And finally, concepts like freedom and revolution were recast in terms of biological systems. These changes have come to shape how artificial intelligence is governed, imagined, and designed in our present. Moreover, I argue the ideology and technology of self-organization underpins contemporary machine learning technologies to the detriment of  civil rights and political enfranchisement of queers, women, blacks, and many other groups and to the support of reactionary politics.

I will trace three categories. 1) Liberty: the reconceptualization of the notion of freedom in neo-liberal economic thought and in the cognitive and neuro-sciences, as related to technology and the market. 2) Equality and Determinism: The re-imagining and traffic of ideas of “equality” as understood in terms of weights and statistics and determinism in evolutionary biology and machine learning. And 3) Fraternity: how have histories of sociology, evolution, and demography, concerning difference and affiliation between human groups and more than human species shaped contemporary architectures and technologies of social networks and machine learning?

Critical to this study is expanding from research on one technology (GANS or LLM's  for example) to more broadly asking about human decision making and its automation in the late 20th century and early 21st. Artificial Intelligence is treated not as a technology but as an epistemology—a frame shaping practice, representation, and technology. The main concern is shifting questions from whether technology will replace the human, to what forms of humans and machines are desired in the future? And by whom? And for whom?

Related Publications:

Planetary Experiments (on-going)

This project investigates the changing relationship between knowledge production and collective social life in the Anthropocene. From geo-engineering to synthetic biology, the accelerated digitization and networking of research practices is allowing the entire planet to become a tool that can be used for the purpose of measurement and observation. In turn, planetary phenomena and processes – from food security to the climate crisis to the COVID-19 pandemic – have become the subject of experimental research and mass testing. The project explores emerging relationships between science, nature and politics in the age of the Anthropocene. It also asks about the future of knowledge production, design, and engineering in times of big data, climate crisis and geo-political transition.

A key motivation for this study is the fact that experimentation has become a means of politics and communication in recent years and decades. From testing genetically modified crops, to the uncontrolled experimentation with cloud seeding by national governments, to spectacular space projects by corporations—governments, corporations, and different publics employ highly visible large scale scientific and engineering experiments. They do so to transform territory, propagate ideas of the future and technical prowess, and create economies and politics. In an age in which forms of “testing,” “prototyping,” and “demoing” are presented as virtues, experiments no longer serve merely to produce and confirm scientific knowledge, but have additional political, ethical, economic, and aesthetic implications and consequences. These are also central categories to design thinking and practice. And yet even as scientific and technical knowledge has become more important than at any time in the past, distrust of science has also increased significantly in recent years. The fact that the number of collective experiments increases even as we witness an erosion in public trust in historical forms of scientific authority and objectivity is a central subject of this research, and PlanEx offers important contributions to respond to these present and future challenges.

Related articles and projects:

SMARTNESS AND WEALTH (VW Foundation Funds) 2023-2027

Smartness promises wealth to cities around the world. Across the planet we see a growing investment by corporations, philanthropies, start-ups, and governments in computational infrastructures that will manage cities and their inhabitants. This ‘smartness’ is closely affiliated with venture capital and start-up experiments. It is assumed that smart systems in logistics, real estate, finance, energy and retail will encourage innovation and entrepreneurship, and will resolve problems of top-down economic planning. In this project we will examine five particular aspects of this new model of wealth creation and urban management: optimization, sustainability, inclusion, resilience, and convenience. These are all particular varieties of the promise of wealth associated with smartness: the optimization and subsequent affordability provided by logistics; the sustainability required for living on a planet in crisis; the inclusion in economic life offered by decentralized finance; the energy resilience to climate change, resource limitations, and geopolitics promised by smart grids and financial hedging;  and the convenience sold by smart retail. It is smartness which propels these promises – a smartness promoted by venture capital. Whether through public smart city initiatives or the plethora of private urban platforms for mobility, sustainability, finance and retail, venture capital is reshaping how wealth is produced and reproduced in the cities of today and tomorrow. This project examines historically and ethnographically the relationship between contemporary smart urbanism, wealth, and transformations in venture capital engendered through ‘smart’ discourses. Ethnographically the research will occur in five sites in five different countries: Hamburg as Germany’s premier smart, logistical city; Kolkata as one of India’s select smart cities centered around sustainability; Nairobi’s ‘Silicon Savannah’ as a nexus of decentralized, financial technologies; Denver as a major start-up and innovation corridor in the United States, centered on smart energy and innovations; and Tokyo as an epicenter of smart, convenient retail. Historically, the research will examine genealogies of ‘smartness’ and venture capital at these sites and compare  venture capital and ‘smart’ urban initiatives globally. The project thus offers a detailed view of the making of smart cities, and the promises of optimization, sustainability, inclusion, resilience and convenience which constitute a large part of what we consider wealth today. This project engages five PI’s (of which I am the co-lead) located at TU Dresden, Dresden, Germany,  Jindal School of Art and Architecture, Delhi, India, African Center for Cities, Cape Town, South Africa, Leuphana University, Lüneberg,  Germany, and Concordia University, Montréal, Canada.

Related Publications:

Against Catastrophe 2020-2025

The aim of this project is to interrogate the concept of catastrophe – how it is defined, analyzed, and deployed – and anti-catastrophic practices in an attempt to envision alternatives to our present. It does so through an edited volume, art and design commissions, and offline and online exhibitions that explore catastrophe and anti-catastrophe in practice around the globe. The focus throughout is on how novel thinking and practice in design, architecture, and technology can open possibilities for more equitably, democratically,  and sustainably surviving a catastrophic world, but also expanding epistemic horizons beyond such apocalyptic thinking. The collaborators on the project include international scholars, artists, and journalists , and the project is committed to open collaboration and new partners and participants.
www.againstcatastrophe.net

Governing through Design 2020-2025

Governing through Design is a collaborative research project that investigates how design impacts society. We use history and ethnography to develop new narratives of how the practices and epistemologies of design reconceive global politics and everyday lifeworlds, and invest in pedagogies that seek to intervene in contemporary practices of design. We are an interdisciplinary collective of researchers based at the FHNW Academy of Art and Design, the University of Basel, and Concordia University Montréal, with backgrounds in design history, urban studies, media studies, anthropology, sociology, political science, and science & technology studies. Governing through Design is a collaborative research project by the FHNW Academy of Art and Design, the University of Basel, and Concordia University Montréal, supported by a Sinergia Grant of the Swiss National Science Foundation. www.governingthrough.design

Geopolitics of Automation 2020-2023

This collaboration with University of Western Sydney examines how artificially intelligent infrastructures, such as procurement centers and data centers are transforming territory and impacting labor in China, Germany, Canada, and Malaysia. For example, we are examining current labor struggles over Amazon procurement centers in Germany, and how indigenous groups are being affected by Alibaba and Amazon’s labor practices in Malaysia.  We are also working on digital methods, including simulating supply chains and automation systems with computer scientists and artists. Our goals are to both study territorial transformations due to technology and rethink how we represent and gather data about these infrastructures. At TU Dresden developing digital methods and new forms of visualization would be a key component of any research program.

Automating the Logistical City: Space, Algorithms, Speculation 2021-2024

This project is a collaboration with Leuphana University, Germany funded by Volkswagen Stiftung (2021-2024). The research examines rapidly changing urban environments in Germany, the United States, Australia, and China. We are particularly examining how AI and automation are changing financial, labor, and real estate markets and how this is impacting life, geography, and land use.

Reclaiming the Planet: 2018-2022

This project examines the impact of Industry 4.0 and new big data and artificial intelligence technologies on older extraction, forestry, and agricultural industries in Northern Quebec. It is funded by FQRSC, and I am the Primary Investigator. The research asks: How are new technologies transforming extraction industries and impacting indigenous groups in the area? How might these same technologies also impact the future of these territories? And aid in creating circular economies and reclaiming toxic industrial sites? How might we also address historical wrongs and repatriate dispossessed indigenous groups and knowledges at these sites? It is a collaboration between anthropologists and literature students at Concordia University, landscape architects at the school of architecture at Université de Montréal and reclamation geo-engineers and ecologists at Université du Quebec en Abitibi- Témiscamingue.  We are simultaneously documenting current changes to the landscape and speculating on future designs for soon to be abandoned mining and forestry installations. You can view the first part this project at: www.reclaimingtheplanet.net

Zu dieser Seite

Christian Olszowa
Letzte Änderung: 30.01.2026