How Tech Trials Put Society to the Test

Tech trials turn society into a testing ground, even as they dismantle the conditions for the evaluation of technology from the standpoint of social life. Based on a discussion of street tests of automated vehicles, police pilots of facial recognition technologies, and a controversial trial of a medical diagnostics app in a hospital in the UK, I argue that such tests present ‘trials of implicitness’. As these trials inscribe compute-intensive technologies into the background of everyday life, they render innovation implicit and contribute to the dismantling of social conditions for accountability. Tracing this effect back to the paradigm of experimental innovation, which favours the testing of new technologies in society from an early stage in their development, I argue that tech trials enable the ‘infrastructuralisation’ of testing in society. To counter this, we must develop a new kind of ‘Durkheim test’: only by creating experimental situations will we become able to evaluate so-called intelligent technologies against societal objectives.