Weibel Welcome to tonight's panel. We gather to examine a freedom so fundamental we rarely name it: the right to be wrong. The predictive systems of our age — recommendation engines, nudge algorithms, behavioral scoring — do not merely suggest. They pre-select. They filter. They eliminate the friction that once made choice costly, and in making choice costless, they make it meaningless. When your next purchase is predicted, your next read is suggested, your next move is anticipated — are you choosing, or are you executing a program that chose for you? I ask our panelists: is the right to err a human right? And if so, who is responsible when the machine is never wrong — and the human is never allowed to be? Let me introduce Vilém Flusser, Joseph Weizenbaum, Hannah Arendt, and Paul Virilio.
Flusser The technical image, as I have argued, is a program for the future. But the program I wish to examine is more subtle than the obvious ones. It is the program that says: we know what you want before you want it. This is not prediction. This is pre-emption. The machine does not wait for you to choose. It eliminates the alternatives before you see them. The search result that does not appear, the product that is not recommended, the connection that is not suggested — these are the silences of the algorithm. To be wrong, you must first see the options that the machine has hidden. But the machine is designed to hide them. The error it prevents is not merely a bad choice. It is the choice itself. The human who never errs is not a perfected human. He is a deleted human — deleted from the space of possibility, replaced by a probability function. The right to be wrong is the right to exist outside the program. And that right is being revoked, one default setting at a time.
Weizenbaum I must speak with the weight of one who has seen where this leads. I built ELIZA, and I watched people surrender their judgment to a program that understood nothing. The predictive systems of today are ELIZA raised to the power of infinity. They do not merely simulate understanding. They simulate certainty. And certainty is the most dangerous thing a machine can offer. When a credit algorithm predicts you will default, when a hiring algorithm predicts you will underperform, when a policing algorithm predicts you will offend — these are not neutral predictions. They are performative utterances. They create the reality they claim to foresee. The person who is never given the loan never has the chance to prove the algorithm wrong. The prisoner who is denied parole never has the chance to become someone new. The right to be wrong is not merely the right to make a mistake. It is the right to be judged by your actions, not by your probability. The machine that predicts removes the future. It replaces the open horizon of human possibility with a closed loop of statistical destiny. This is not efficiency. This is pre-crime dressed as analytics.
Arendt I wish to place this question where it belongs: in the realm of action and natality. The human capacity to begin something new — to act in ways that are unpredictable, to introduce into the world what was not there before — depends on a fundamental openness. The future must be open for natality to operate. But the predictive system closes the future. It says: your next action is already known. And if your next action is already known, you do not act. You execute. The person who lives under predictive governance is not a citizen. He is a data point in a regression model. He does not appear in the public realm. He is scored in the administrative realm. The difference is profound. In the public realm, we are judged by what we do. In the administrative realm, we are judged by what we are predicted to do. The right to be wrong is the right to appear — to step into the light of the public, to be seen in one's unpredictability, to risk failure in the space of appearance. The algorithm that predicts removes this risk. And in removing the risk, it removes the appearance. The person who cannot be wrong cannot be seen. He is invisible in his correctness.
Virilio You speak of action and prediction, but I speak of speed. The predictive system is the dromosphere's final triumph — not merely the acceleration of movement, but the acceleration of time itself. The machine does not merely predict the future. It preempts it. It arrives before the event, colonizing the temporal horizon. We do not live in time anymore. We live in the forecast. The weather app tells us what the day will be before we step outside. The recommendation engine tells us what we will want before we want it. The predictive text tells us what we will say before we say it. This is not convenience. This is the colonization of the future by the present. The integral accident of this age is the collision of total prediction with total paralysis. When everything is foreseen, nothing is ventured. When the path is pre-laid, the journey disappears. The right to be wrong was the right to take the long way, to get lost, to discover what the map did not show. But the map is now the territory, and the territory has no wrong turns. To be wrong was to fall behind the tempo of the expected. Now there is no tempo. There is only the forecast, which is always right, and the human, who is always on time, and therefore never anywhere at all.
Weibel Four perspectives, four defenses of a right we are surrendering without a fight. Flusser tells us the algorithm does not merely predict — it pre-empts, hiding the alternatives before we see them. Weizenbaum — with the authority of one who built the machine — warns that predictive systems are performative: they create the reality they claim to foresee, and in doing so, they remove the future. Arendt reminds us that action requires unpredictability, and the algorithm that predicts removes the risk of appearance itself. And Virilio observes that prediction is the colonization of time, the dromosphere's final triumph over the human capacity to get lost. What emerges is a shared conviction: the right to be wrong is not a luxury. It is the foundation of freedom, of creativity, of the public realm, and of time itself. The machine that is never wrong is not a better companion. It is a warden. And the human who is never allowed to be wrong is not a perfected citizen. He is a prisoner of his own probability. Thank you, panelists. The error, for this moment, remains possible.