Book Chapter
“A really weird and disturbing erasure of history":
The Human, Futurity, and Facial Recognition Technology
AI technologies seem to promise an objective certainty about the world and the future, and an end to doubt. AI systems are currently responsible for making major determinations about people’s lives around policing, sentencing, hiring, and loan financing. But if the futures predicted by AI are realized, it is not because AI offers a more insightful, prophetic mode of knowing, but rather because AI—which has been embraced by governments and corporations alike as the solution to nearly every problem—enjoys considerable political and cultural authority and financial power while extending worldviews that uphold racial capitalism and colonial logics. In the face of AI’s considerable material effects on people’s lives and pervasive claims about its predictive power, certainty, and omniscience, this essay turns to possibility as a structuring aspect both of AI’s operations and of futurity.
Like notions of the future as singular and predictable, futurity and the possibility it suggests are deeply rooted in history. Indeed, there is nothing inherently prophetic about AI’s capacity to augur the future; there is only the authority AI systems have been given to determine which aspects of history and which worldviews function as truths that ground processes of algorithmic verification.
The FACE Plus database is no more neutral or objective than the algorithms that analyze this data. Data, including the processes of collection, classification, and manipulation that construct and produce data and datasets, are shaped by history and relations of power.