NM88 | Orit Halpern on Agentic Imaginaries (2025)

Our guest is Orit Halpern: co-author of The Smartness Mandate (MIT Press, 2023); author of Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945 (Duke, 2014); and Full Professor and Chair of Digital Cultures at Technische Universität Dresden.Often in discussions about machine learning and smartness, AI is presented as the natural path of human progress, an evolutionary – almost biological – development that emerged out of human communication systems and that has the potential to far exceed them. But as Orit argues, these technologies are neither inevitable nor inhuman. Rather they are the result of a particular intersection of neoliberal theory, psychology, and computer science, which generated the economic incentives, political will, and public desire for AI to exist in the specific form we have now.On this episode, Orit animates the technological imaginary that gave rise to our culture of AI, asking, among other things, how a highly adaptive, machine-learning enabled world changes the terms of political possibility and human revolution.-For more: orithalpern.net“Financializing Intelligence: On the Integration of Markets & Machines,“ e-flux, March 2023“Futures of Cybernetic Urbanism” in Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective catalogue of the 19th Venice Architecture Biennale (2025)-Episode image adapted from: Marco Zorzanello photo of the installation TERMS AND CONDITIONS by Transsolar, Bilge Kobas, Daniel A. Barber, and Sonia Seneviratne at La Biennale di Venezia, 2025