POWER IS IN THE STATUS QUO

“Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers. To achieve this, it is at once too much and too little that the prisoner should be constantly observed by an inspector: too little, for what matters is that he knows himself to be observed; too much, because he has no need in fact of being so. In view of this, Bentham laid down the principle that power should be visible and unverifiable. Visible: the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the tall outline of the central tower from which he is spied upon. Unverifiable: the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so. In order to make the presence or absence of the inspector unverifiable, so that the prisoners, in their cells, cannot even see a shadow, Bentham envisaged not only venetian blinds on the windows of the central observation hall, but, on the inside, partitions that intersected the hall at right angles and, in order to pass from one quarter to the other, not doors but zig-zag openings; for the slightest noise, a gleam of light, a brightness in a half-opened door would betray the presence of the guardian. The Panopticon is a machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad: in the peripheric ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen.”

excerpt from ‘Panopticism’ in Foucault, Michel Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison

“Some definitions that you may run into as you read more about (this) in the future:”

Automaton

1. A mechanical figure or contrivance constructed to act as if by its own motive power; robot.
2. A person or animal that acts in a monotonous, routine manner, without active intelligence.
3. Something capable of acting automatically or without an external motive force.

Simulacrum

1. A slight, unreal, or superficial likeness or semblance.
2. An effigy, image, or representation: a simulacrum of Aphrodite.

Doppelgänger

1. A ghostly double or counterpart of a living person.

Golem

1. Jewish Folklore. A figure artificially constructed in the form of a human being and endowed with life.
2. A stupid and clumsy person; blockhead.
3. An Automaton or Android.
1. An automaton in the form of a human being.

Cyborg

1. A person who’s physiological functioning is aided by or dependent upon a mechanical or electronic device.

Cybernetics

1. The study of human control functions and of mechanical and electronic systems designed to replace them, involving the application of statistical mechanics to communication engineering.

Robot

1. A machine that resembles a human and does mechanical, routine tasks on command.
2. Any machine or mechanical device that operates automatically with humanlike skill.
3. Operating automatically: a robot train operating between airline terminals.

Urschleim

1. Original protoplasm from which all life evolved (From the German)

Urschleim in Silicon

1. The birth of Artificial Intelligence in silicon

Finite State Machine

1. An abstract machine consisting of a set of states (including the initial state), a set of input events, a set of output events, and a state transition function. The function takes the current state and an input event and returns the new set of output events and the next state. Some states may be designated as “terminal states”. The state machine can also be viewed as a function that maps an ordered sequence of input events into a corresponding sequence of (sets of) output events.

Lawrence of Arabia