PERSON
Lorraine Daston
The historian who showed that “objectivity” was invented in the mid-nineteenth century, that every knowledge-producing technology is eventually over-trusted and then calibrated, and that AI's
confidence artifact—its prose fluency—is the most powerful and most invisible one in the history of science.
Lorraine Daston is the preeminent historian of scientific objectivity and the scholar whose four-decade research program at the
Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin has given the age of artificial intelligence its most precise historical mirror. Her landmark 2007 book
Objectivity, co-authored with Peter Galison, showed that objectivity is not a timeless scientific ideal but a historically specific concept invented around 1860 in response to anxieties about the distorting influence of individual human judgment on scientific representation. Before objectivity there was
“truth-to-nature,” in which skilled illustrators synthesized idealized composite images from many specimens; after objectivity there came “trained judgment,” in which expert interpretation was rehabilitated as a necessary complement to mechanical recording. Each regime responded to the perceived failures of its predecessor, introduced its own characteristic distortions, and was eventually calibrated by new evaluative institutions built around its specific failure modes. Daston's central thesis—that every knowledge-producing technology has a
confidence