The “Anthrobocene” project focuses on the potential of robots in a generally hopeful sense: their use in care settings and their ability to work where humans are at their limits, for example in dangerous contexts like firefighting, but Hornickel’s initial unease about the future of AI and robotics remains. “There are moral implications that I find challenging,” she says. “There’s a lot of global pressure to develop these new technologies, and it sometimes seems they are introduced before there are clear rules or regulations around them. To me, the biggest question is: who is responsible if a robot is acting autonomously?”
Hornickel was denied access to Germany’s military, whose use of robots she wanted to document, but the weaponization of new technologies is deeply unsettling for her. “If you look at the war in Ukraine, for example, you can see how much AI is already being used in modern warfare,” she says. “You can see how the same technologies can be used in totally different ways: a drone that can find and identify missing persons can also be used to identify, target and kill people.” Asked to boil her misgivings about militarized robotics down, the photographer says she feels “that through AI and robots we are reducing human responsibility, while increasing our distance from the act of violence, which is really concerning.”