Helen Mair

Reality and objective truth has been debated throughout human history. Since the Enlightenment, Western culture has replaced the Christian based system of truth with social structures based on reason and rationalisation. Big data and computational thinking are the latest paradigms that attempt to provide society with an impartial objective architecture. These can only converge towards this ambition as no system can avoid being influenced by its subjective human creators.

As machine learning sits on the threshold of glitch-free interpretation and calculation of the world around it, we lose comprehension of the inner workings, and fallibilities become hidden within perceived accuracy. This moment, on the precipice, we can still see ourselves outside of computation, but whether this separation lasts or whether society becomes absorbed into an objectivity defined by computational machines remains to be seen.