About the talk
This talk develops the concept of “agentic governance” to analyze how contemporary AI platforms for climate modeling, military operations, and logistics constitute an emerging episteme with significant implications for geo-politics and for futures of knowledge production and democracy. Drawing on case studies of digital twinning initiatives—including the European Union’s Destination Earth, NVIDIA’s Earth-2, Alibaba’s City Brain and Huawei’s Global City Intelligent Twins, and Palantir’s enterprise platforms—the talk traces three interrelated transformations. First, an epistemic shift from causal, explanatory models to non-causal “generative” inference reorganizes what counts as knowledge and who qualifies as expert. Second, a temporal displacement inverts the traditional sequence of deliberation and deployment, with technologies assessed through continuous “learning” rather than prior democratic or scientific debate. Third, planetary-scale experimentation produces not unified global governance but fragmented data spaces serving competing political-economic blocs. By situating these developments within a genealogy extending from Cold War systems modeling to contemporary AI infrastructures, the talk argues that experimentation itself has become infrastructuralized, demanding urgent attention to the politics of technological testing.
About Orit Halpern
Orit Halpern is the Lighthouse Professor and the Chair of Digital Cultures at Technische Universität Dresden. Her research is on histories of cybernetics, design, and artificial intelligence. She is currently working on two projects. The first is a history of automating decision making and the redefinition of freedom and the second examines the history and futures of experimentation at planetary scales in design, science, and engineering. Her most recent book with Robert Mitchell (MIT Press December 2023) is titled the Smartness Mandate. It examines how we have come to believe that digital computing is essential to human survival, and how “smart” technologies and ideologies are remaking planetary futures. Her first book, Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945 (Duke UP 2015), is a genealogy of politics, big data, and interactivity. She has also published widely in venues such as Grey Room, Critical Inquiry, Journal of Visual Culture, and E-Flux. She currently directs the Digital Cultures Research Group and the Schaufler Lab; two research groups bridging the arts, environmental sciences, media, and the social sciences to envision non-catastrophic futures.
Read more about her work at orithalpern.net
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