AI-driven biometry and the infrastructures of everyday life

Over the past years, we have become witness to the exponentially growing proliferation of biometric technologies: facial recognition technology and fingerprint scanners in our phones, sleep-pattern detection technology on our wrists or speech-recognition software that facilitates auto-dictation such as captioning. What all these technologies do is measure and record some aspect of the human body or its function: facial recognition technology measures facial features, fingerprint scanners measure the distance between the ridges that make up a unique fingerprint, sleep-pattern detection measures movement in our sleep as a proxy for wakefulness, and so on. AI is fundamentally a scaling technology. It is walking in the footsteps of many other technologies that have deployed classification and categorisation in the name of making bureaucratic processes more efficient, from ancient library systems to punch cards, to modern computer-vision technologies that'know' the difference between a house, a road, a vehicle and a human. The basic idea of these scaling technologies is to minimise situations in which individual judgement is required (see also Lorraine Daston's seminal work on rules).