Orit Halpern

Lecture Abstract:

Agentic Empires

Artificial intelligence is entering a new phase. “Agentic” systems do more than generate content or predictions: they pursue goals and execute decisions with limited human supervision. As they enter finance, welfare, logistics, and warfare, institutions are granting machines capacities once reserved for persons—at scale, and with little public deliberation.

This talk investigates  how agency became a technology. The paper will reconstruct three genealogies since the 1960s: autonomy, tracing how delegated initiative became a property of networks and environments in military research, human factors, and cognitive science; emergence, mapping how self-organization became a model of order and innovation for biology, economics, and management; and alignment, examining how morality, value, and incentive were reformulated as problems of human-machine coordination.

The hypothesis is that agentic AI is enabling a new mode of power—government by agents—in which conduct is shaped by configuring the intermediaries through which people act with great implications for contemporary societies and creating new forms of power and organization.

Workshop Abstract:

Biography:

Orit Halpern is the Lighthouse Professor and Chair of Digital Cultures at Technische Universität Dresden, where she directs the Digital Cultures Research Group and the Schaufler Lab—two interdisciplinary research groups bridging the arts, environmental sciences, media, and social sciences to envision non-catastrophic futures.

Her work traces how computational systems have reshaped decision-making, knowledge, and political life from the mid-twentieth century to the present. She is currently pursuing two major projects: a history of automated decision-making and its transformation of concepts of freedom and the human, and an investigation of planetary-scale experimentation across design, science, and engineering.

Her most recent book, The Smartness Mandate (MIT Press, 2023) asks how digital computing came to be seen as essential to human survival—and how “smart” technologies and ideologies are remaking planetary futures. Her first book, Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945 (Duke University Press, 2015), offers a genealogy of big data, interactivity, and their politics. Her writing has also appeared in numerous venues including New Media and Society, Grey Room, Critical Inquiry, Journal of Visual Culture, E-Flux, and Art in America, and she has also featured numerous times at the Venice Biennial for Architecture and other artistic venues.