Biometrics: A Weapon 4 New Worlds
Colloquium Politicum – Artificial Intelligence as a Challenge and an Opportunity
- Date: Dec 10, 2024
- Time: 06:15 PM - 07:45 PM (Local Time Germany)
- Speaker: Prof. Nitzan Lebovic (Leigh University, USA)
- Co-convenor: PD Dr. Elisa Orrù (MPI-CSL)
- Location: University of Freiburg/Germany
- Room: HS 1199, KG I
- Host: Colloquium politicum in cooperation with: Lehrstuhl für Polit. Philosophie, Theorie und Ideengeschichte; Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security and Law; Center for Security and Society
- Contact: e.orru@csl.mpg.de
My talk focuses on the emergence of contemporary biometric systems and the growing fear of a “surveillance society” (David Lyon, 2001). In the first part of the talk, I will analyze the history of biometric surveillance, grounded in a long history of physiognomic and racial taxonomy, on the one hand, and the potentiality of “universal suspicion,” on the other. In the second part of the talk, I examine the case of biometric legislation in Israel, aimed at making biometrics – nowadays combined with AI – an expression of technological superiority and what Deleuze and Guattari called the “control society” or the “man-machine assemblage.” Such universal assemblages are used, often as experimental weapons, against populations in the “global south”.