In the AI of the Beholder: Trevor Paglen’s How to See Like a Machine

“There are now more cameras on planet Earth than human beings.” A curious arithmetic, given how thoroughly the eye has been enthroned as the guarantor of experience. For centuries, to see meant that someone was there, even if that someone could only be imagined through the image left behind. Now vision takes place without the consolations of a witness. A photograph can pass directly into coordinate data, then find its way back to the world as an instruction. The picture may never appear before a pair of human eyes, yet it can determine whose face opens a door or whose body invites suspicion. Somewhere between capture and consequence, seeing has detached itself from sight. Trevor Paglen’s How to See Like a Machine: Images After AI enters this dislocation with the curiosity of an artist and the suspicion of someone who has learned that even suspicion can be engineered. His central provocation concerns the fate of images after they cease to require spectators. Behind it lurks an even…