To operate in an unpredictable environment, a vehicle with advanced driving assistance systems, such as a robot or a drone, not only needs to register its surroundings but also to combine data from different sensors into a world model, for which it employs filter algorithms. Such world models, as this article argues with reference to the SLAM problem in robotics, consist of nothing other than probabilities about states and events arising in the environment. The model, thus, contains a virtuality of (...) possible worlds that are the basis for adaptive behavior. The article shows that the current development of these technologies requires new concepts because their complex adaptive behaviors cannot be explained by referring them to mere algorithmic processes. Instead, it proposes the heuristic instrument of microdecisions to designate the temporality of decisions between alternatives that are created by probabilistic procedures of world modeling. Microdecisions are more than the implementation of deterministic processes—they decide between possibilities and, thus, always open up the potential of their otherness. By describing autonomous adaptive technologies with this heuristic, the question of sovereignty inevitably arises. It forces us to re-think what autonomy means when decisions can be automated. (shrink)

At this historical moment, few terms are as charged and powerful as the omnipresent term environment. It has become a strategic tool for politics and theories alike, crossed the borders of the disciplines of biology and ecology, and left the manifold field of environmentalism. This article explores the first steps on this path of expansion, in which the term becomes an argumentative resource and achieves a plausibility that transforms it into a universal tool. It is not self-evident to describe ubiquitous (...) media, cinematic spaces, or augmented realities as environments. To understand how the term gained this plausibility, it is necessary to distinguish it from two other terms: the French milieu and the German Umwelt. When these three terms substitute one another and are used as translations, they lose their historical specificity and depth, and three different theoretical and philosophical traditions merge into indifference. Consequently, a conceptual history of the term environment and its relation to milieu and Umwelt—as well as terms such as medium, atmosphere, ambiance, and climate—can help us to understand the potentials and dangers of the term’s plausibility. In this sense, the article argues for a new perspective on epistemologies of surrounding that relate that which surrounds to that which is surrounded. (shrink)

This article revisits the debate between Leibniz and Clarke to explore conceptual shifts in the use of the term medium. A basic tenet of physics since antiquity says that every act of communication ‐ that is, every transmission of a force from the place of its cause to that of its effect ‐ requires a medium to ensure its interaction. In the context of the Early Modern Period, media were regarded as mediating instances that enabled communication. If these instances were (...) not immediately connected but rather spatially separated from one another ‐ as in the case of gravitation, magnetism or electricity ‐ then there had to be a medium to ensure both the transmission of the force and the causal connection. Although the mediation of the medium took place in an inexplicable way, it seemed to explain one process or another by its mere introduction. The epistemological foundations of communicability ‐ those with which Leibniz, Clarke and Newton were attempting to come to terms ‐ remain relevant to the descriptive language with which we depict our present and its technological condition. Without duration there is no mediation but rather immediacy and simultaneity. Immediacy means that the necessary separation between the two events, the abyss of communication, is negated. Immediacies, like instantaneous actions at a distance, presuppose the difference they are deemed to eradicate. (shrink)