FRANKFURT, GERMANY - Optimization is one of the major selling points of automation systems based on Artificial Intelligence (AI). It consists as much of a set of offers - with clear and obvious applications, such as optimizing the image-based diagnosis in healthcare - as it does of a proposition to attain the mirage of a perfectly optimized lifestyle by monitoring one’s every action, from food intake to daily activities, even though such perfect optimization remains highly imperfect.

In 2019 at the Unfinished festival, I organized and mediated a conversation between Angelica Dass, a Madrid-based artist born in Brazil who is most well-known for her project Humanae, and Moran Cerf, a neuroscientist from Tel Aviv who is based in the United States and specializes in human-machine interaction at the level of the brain, exploring how technology could hack into consciousness. The question I posed was: ‘What would a perfectly optimized life look like with the help of technology?’ More specifically, I asked the speakers to imagine a hypothetical situation in which a decision-making algorithm has access to all of one’s data, from genetic make-up to neural mapping, to every bit and byte of one’s lifestyle choices made up to the present.

Would the subject choose between a butter croissant s/he craves, or something healthier like kale and salmon on oat crackers, which the algorithm would suggest in order to optimize his/her health?

While Angelica chose the croissant, Moran argued that he would prefer to use his cognitive power to choose something other than one of these two choices, going for a sandwich instead. He also hoped to live a prolonged, healt