From schools to health professionals, from employers to governing institutions the world around us is increasingly using AI technologies and algorithms to judge us and make decisions about our lives. But are these machines objective and fair in judging us? Our answer is no. These technologies are often used to make the process of decision making more efficient and objective and to ‘avoid the human error’. Yet paradoxically they are filled with systemic ‘errors’, ‘biases’ and ‘inaccuracies’ when it comes to human profiling. The Human Error Project, a research project conducted from 2020 to 2025 at the University of St. Gallen, combined anthropological theory with critical data and AI research, and aimed to investigate the fallacy of algorithms when it comes to reading humans. The aim of our research team – and this website – has been to shed light on the fact that the race for AI innovation is often shaped by stereotypical and reductionist understandings of human nature, and by new emerging conflicts about what it means to be human.

The Human Error Project has now concluded, and this website will no longer be updated. It will remain available as a reference for future research and as an archive of the work produced through the project. For information about the current activities of the Principal Investigator, Prof. Veronica Barassi, and her team at the Media and Culture Research Unit within the University of St. Gallen’s Institute of Media and Communications Management (MCM), or to get in touch with them, please refer to the institutional webpage.