“We call it a mandate,” says Dr Orit Halpern, “because we’re interested in how machine learning and artificial intelligence have become natural and necessary to the evolution of society. It’s when we decide a particular technology is essential to the way we live in a way it hasn’t always been.”
As an example, the co-author of ‘The Smartness Mandate’ describes a scenario in which her overheated students instinctively resorted to the digital environment control system of the lecture room, when “they could have just opened the window. It’s now automatic to assume a computer-driven system will be more efficient.” During the past five decades, says Halpern, we have seen human intelligence redefined as computational.
Halpern, who is Lighthouse Professor and chair of digital cultures and societal change at Technische Universität Dresden, states that the book she co-wrote with Robert Mitchell is about two things. “First, it is a history of how the idea of smartness...