The future looms overhead like a drone, projecting a threat stream of catastrophe that can seem inevitable, as if we are stuck in a failure loop of human coordination. But now, slowly emerging from the collective malaise of a global pandemic, might we begin to sense new ways out of this spiral?

In sensory ecology, the concept of matched filters4.3.1 describes how diverse sensory systems develop among organisms, each tuned by natural selection to signals useful for thriving under different ecological conditions. Correspondingly, the tools we deploy to augment human sensing—congeries of devices, networks, and algorithms—are also optimized for specific goals, within narrow economic constraints.

While these sensory extensions have come to fundamentally reshape our world, we have only just begun to understand their impacts. The emerging domain of machine behavior4.3.2 seeks to examine such artificial systems through the lens of behavioral ecology, using frameworks developed to understand animal behaviors that were once also considered as impenetrable “black boxes.” Such an approach may help to identify the blind spots that are often baked into systems engineered for particular economic goals, and thus avoid the resulting unintended consequences.

However, this interdisciplinary challenge requires input from the arts and humanities, which are equipped to critique the underlying values of these systems and analyze their societal effects, and must furthermore open up to engage with historically excluded people and perspectives. To this end, the current pathway gathers together a series of projects around the questions: Who gets to decide what is sensed, and for which purposes?

As a starting point, we might expand our notion of technology to include anything that augments an organism’s sensory capacities, as discussed in “The Multispecies World of Technology,”4.3.3 a conversation between artist Elaine Gan and cultural anthropologist Betina Stoetzer. For example: in schools of fish, flocks of birds, and other animal groups, the co-evolution of individual sensing and movement behavior results in mobile distributed sensor networks, collective technologies useful for predator detection. By paying attention to nearby neighbors, individuals can effectively expand their sensory ranges, benefiting from distant information transmitted through the group. The forces that shape such nonhuman technologies result in complex trade-offs, including asymmetries of labor in groups, which can be examined using models from game theory. Recent studies, like “Evolutionary Games with Environmental Feedbacks,”4.3.4 have begun to explore the reciprocal interactions that emerge when such adaptations lead to environmental changes, which then feedback to modify the incentives of different strategies.

Choosing which signals to filter out or tune in is always an act of valuing, constrained by the economics of sensing. Among human-designed sensory systems, current incentive structures can often result in asymmetries of power and access. For example, many “AI” platforms utilizing computer vision and machine learning conceal the painstaking, low-paid labor behind tasks like categorizing and labeling datasets needed to train algorithms to see with human eyes (and biases). In the essay “Anomaly Detection,”4.3.5 media theorist Matteo Pasquinelli describes these forms of “algorithmic vision” as primitive eyes of sorts, trained to distinguish minimal features, whether pattern or anomaly. Since these features are defined by those with the power to decide what is sensed, such algorithms can end up not only reproducing, but accelerating, existing biases and inequalities.

However, as the discourse around AI ethics has shown, relying on technological fixes, without confronting the structures underlying these inequities, is futile. One crucial task for artists and scholars in this work is revealing the historic scope of hidden labor, as in artworks like Two Breezes,4.3.6 which examines technology used to conceal the labor of enslaved and colonized people, and essays like “Data Flow,”4.3.7 highlighting the hidden labor of women in the history of science. Reckoning with these histories and limitations to propose more equitable futures will require new forms of coordinating, sharing, and synthesizing knowledge across disciplines, as called for in “Protocols for the Phase Transition: Towards New Alliances” by the artistic climate change initiative Alliance of the Southern Triangle.4.3.8

Given the confluence of crises resulting from the colonialist and extractivist values that have dominated the Anthropocene, such alliances should also incorporate other ways of knowing and sensing. The knowledge embedded in oral traditions, for example, can help counter current tendencies of extracting sensory data for its use value, as shown in the projects “Bastar Diary”4.3.9 and “Praying for the Water,”4.3.10 which focus on shared meaning derived from lived experience. However, negotiating the boundaries between learning from traditional knowledge and exploiting is a delicate balance, as discussed in “Extracts and Exclusions”4.3.11 and “Anomalous Alliances: Nature and Politics in the Yasuní Proposal,”4.3.12 a case study involving resource extraction, scientific classification, and Indigenous knowledge in Ecuador. Incorporating Indigenous and other historically excluded perspectives can open up new ways of thinking about trust, common goods, and consensus, as described in “Lands, Legitimacy, and Lines of Trust,”4.3.13 which are especially relevant to the coordination problems of “trust-minimizing” blockchain and distributed-ledger systems.

In particular, new models of consensus and collective governance, such as decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), could benefit from such perspectives. Yet, a lack of critical engagement regarding who participates in their development remains, as addressed in, e.g., “The Byzantine Generalization Problem.”4.3.14 Meanwhile, collective experiments like Black Swan DAO4.3.15 have begun to offer proofs-of-concept for how such tools might break through entrenched institutional structures to create more equitable models of resource distribution and governance. These insights should inform the rapidly developing infrastructure of the decentralized web, which presents an opportunity to redesign our digital and financial ecosystems towards sustainability and inclusion, without repeating unjust patterns of access and power. The building blocks of these distributed and decentralized systems, smart contracts, are like simple sensors that detect abstract signals like price changes or other inputs. Since these act as value judgments that favor certain information, it is important to interrogate their underlying motives. By including more diverse and trans-disciplinary perspectives, the developments of Web3 may yet hope to avoid the fate of the AI tools discussed above, which are used in increasingly advanced ways to maximize profits, manipulate users, and conceal labor.

In “Born a Minim,” I reflect on my research as a field biologist, using satire to draw parallels between the collective behavior of predatory army ants and the values of endless growth, optimization, and convenience that underlie currently dominant platforms. In designing new models, we might learn from such nonhuman entities how to avoid trajectories that evolve towards predation and resource depletion, while identifying conditions that encourage traits like cooperation and mutualism. Since the possibility spaces of artificial intelligence, artificial life, and synthetic biology include zones that could be hostile to existing life, such protocols are needed to encourage “safe” outcomes, while still allowing for the emergence of novelty.

To go beyond the tunnel vision of technosolutionism, as called for in “The Inclosure of Reason,”4.3.16 machines that are “not mere automatons of human bias” will need “a reason to think.” Such new models could open on to the range of play and novelty that can emerge in complex systems, where beauty can often manifest in ways that appear suboptimal, as discussed in the interview “Un/bounded Engineering and Evolutionary Stability.”4.3.17 The project Phenomenal Machines4.3.18 explores such possibilities, creating a world where synthetic life forms develop their own aesthetics by playfully interacting with the environment, freed from the banality of economic constraints. Cultivating more equitable, meaningful, and sensitive technological and social systems will require similar open-ended approaches, while continuing to incorporate long-excluded perspectives into new alliances.