Intimations of Artificial Intelligence and Individual Automobility

Bruno Latour's Aramis, or the Love of Technology is a highly intertextual, narrative account of the failed vision of a “personal rapid transport” system in the Paris of the 1980s. This article demonstrates that the main reason for the failure was not so much the lack of communication among the involved parties, as stated by Latour in his “scientifiction”. Rather, it was a computer technology which, then as now, is unable to process the inevitable amount of “big data” and depends on a highly efficient artificial intelligence. The current political and social narratives about smart transport lead back to the archaic question of free will and determination, informed by the representation of this automatic hyper-network at the interface of public and individual traffic.