Author: Katja de Vries Title: Identity in a World of Ambient Intelligence Abstract: Like its ancestor “ubiquitous Computing,” “ambient Intelligence” has been envisioned as a calm technology, staying in the periphery of our attention. Many ambient intelligent (AmI) devices interact with their users using a logic of anticipatory personalization to create the impression of an environment silently doing the right thing by itself. However, the machine profiling that underlies this personalized anticipation is not transparent in its generation of unique or group profiles. To gain a better understanding of the possible consequences of machine profiling in AmI environments, a comparison is made with currently existing smart CCTV practices for marketing purposes. How does the personalized anticipation in AmI devices affect the ability for self-transformation of one’s personal identity? First, the notion of identity and self-transformation is explored in the light of Foucault’s “technologies of the self.” Identity is understood as emerging from the material instance of one’s relational facticity. This does, however, not exclude the possibility for a self-transformation of one’s identity. The first step for such self-transformation is the understanding of one’s identity as an artifact and not as a pre-given entity. Second, one will have to retrace the mechanisms that produced the differentiations leading to the emergence of one’s identity. Only by tinkering in this manner with “the limits of ourselves” does self- transformation becomes a possible option. However, the mechanisms producing the personalized anticipations in an AmI environment are often over-discreet, black-boxed, deterritorialized statistical stereotypes of which it is hard to have awareness. Jason Salavon’s The Class of 1988 and Benjamin Males’s Target Project might help to bring these invisible mechanisms back into the realm of thought. Keywords: Anticipation; Ambient Intelligence; Identity; Foucault; hypomnémeta; Personalization; Self- Transformation; Smart CCTV; Technologies of the Self; Ubiquitous Computing