Automating the Biological: The Future as Resource and Practice in Digital Biology

• In Event: Automation, Skill and Identity in an Age of AI - II

Abstract

What has been called digital biology is a manifestation of shifts in a biotechnical imagination – at the center of these, the attempt to control living organisms at the genetic level through the software, hardware, and organizational ethos of information sciences for the next big breakthroughs in food, medicine, conservation, and other biosciences (Bennett 2018, Roosth 2017). This paper explores the types of subjectivities cultivated by digital biology’s strongly salvational forward-orientation, and the ways the future is used as both imaginative resource and material practice.

Through a brief, multi-sited ethnography situated in leading facilities of industrial digital biology, this paper characterizes the development and implementation of a series of automated scientist platforms. This implementation has, surprisingly, led to the introduction of a large workforce of technicians attending to tasks never envisioned in the early manifestos of this field (see Endy 2005). Research subjects across the corporate hierarchy acknowledged contradictions between initial visions and present state through consistent referent to a potential future. This temporal disjunction, between a present state often overshadowed by a previously predicted future, and its attendant contradictions and discomforts, was often made tolerable by the possibility of access to the leading edges of research, world saving technologies, and material returns on profit. These observations provide the empirical materials for reflections on the future as a site of genuine meaning making and source of metaphysical inertia within broader sociotechnical imaginaries (Jasanoff 2015).

Author

• Annie Hammang