Astrid Jahncke

The reason for machine learning's influence on a range of disciplines (from Spotify recommendations to crime prediction is, that it lowers the price of prediction) which in turn is an input into decision-making, according to Ajay Agrawal's book Prediction Machines.

We live in a time in which behaviours are continuously commodified – a concept originating in online advertisement, where predictions are made about the likeliness of click-through traffic. Prediction quality increases with the quantity and range of data available, and therefore these mechanisms have a tendency to expand into the offline sphere, an effect which Shoshana Zuboff describes as the current economic reality of a 'Behavioural Futures Market' in her book Surveillance Capitalism.

These mechanisms increasingly infiltrate our day-to-day decisions. 

The Organisation for Human Agency therefore takes strategies from advertisement and architectural image-making to visualise how the increasing use of machine learning will impact our everyday life and change the design of objects and spaces. 

The OHA further creates spatial interventions to question the status quo. To this end, its first building prototype is a hotel - train station. Situated at Clapham Junction (the busiest station in the UK) the hotel is re-imagined as a transient public space bringing together a constantly changing group of guests and characters, the hotel typology provoking moments of unpredictability, with the duration of a guest's stay lasting from minutes to months. 

At its core, the OHA aims to advocate for research into the ethics of machine learning, to reduce embedded biases (and their resultant inequalities) and to mitigate increasing cultural dependence on the past. In order to promote progress towards equality, liberty and freedom in this emerging technological context, we require novel global frameworks to protect citizens from data extraction, non-consensual participation in social science experiments and other similar forms of manipulation, thus to catalyse political change for a more democratic future and the productive coexistence of human and machines.