by veen

One of the more interesting things I've read in a while. It takes the point I was making three years ago, adds some Edward Said and runs with it into the land of geographic epistemology. Sometimes a bit too far, but in a Jaron Lanier kind of too far.

kleinbl00

As advanced sensing machines and spatial technologies become cheaper and more powerful, we will see many more studies like this. Aided by aerial imagery and GPS, binoculars and audio recorders, we can now map everything from elephants and refugees to icebergs and Ubers. We should do so critically and intentionally, bearing in mind that those subjects and agents have their own geographies and spatial sensibilities, and so do the instruments we use to map them.

Increasingly, we turn to artificially-intelligent sensing machines — with their purportedly more objective, efficient, exhaustive, and reliable means of observation and orientation — to shape the protocols and politics of interaction among the various beings who share our cartographic terrain. Yet we must never forget that those computational instruments operationalize space differently — differently from one another and from other “species” of intelligent agents, including us.