Demystifications and Reenchantments of the Human-like Machine

Lucy Suchman

citation needed

“Computational machines as sentient others, imbued with capacities for intelligence and interaction.” Suchman is interested in those that are “human-like,” a term she attempts to discuss in the paper but does not define before the fact. We do, however, see her use the term personhood almost immediately after informing us that if we are expecting a definition of human-like, we will have to read on. The second term seems as important as the first.

Suchman mentions some work with expert systems, A-life, etc., but says she is focused primarily on: the idea embodiment and situated robotics,
affective computing.

Claims that while some (specifically Katherine Hayles) posit resistance to the “posthuman,” (which we should assume includes includes all of the above), by conservative humanists, she feels developments in “situated robotics continue to restage the liberal humanism that in Hayles’ writing they leave behind.”

I. Situated Robotics as a Humanist Project: Embodiment:

The most widely cited exception to the rule of disembodied intelligence in AI is the initiative named “situated robotics,” launched by Rodney Brooks in the 1980s. Brooks’ position has been that rather than a symbolic process that precedes action, cognition must be an emergent property of action, the foundational forms of which he takes to be navigation through a physical environment.

The question for situated robotics as framed by Brooks is whether cognition, and the knowledge it presupposes, can be modeled separately from perception and motor control(1998:137)

Does this same argument underly the possible essentialism of the idea of a “democratic” public space? see http://infopollen.net/notes-collective-culture-and-public-space/

Suchman continues that Alison Adam discusses “a bodied individual in a physical environment, rather than a socially situated individual.” Though it’s not clear if these are presented as exclusive categories. She other possible problems problems with the framing of situated robotics before moving to a discussion and critique of affective computing.

Emotion: “Affective Computing”

Does this definition of emotion really just indicate a sort modal blending that occurs when a mode is the use of the physical (body) by a program which is given situational agency – affects as a sort of lag between shift changes in yr mind?

Suchman points out that “emotion is figured here as the missing ingredient for full (if not quite equal) machine participation in the human world.”

It just seems that were dealing with a moving target, that if the dreams of affective computing become real the idea of being human will just be reconfigured in some new way. We’ll still be “God’s chosen species” whether we claim to believe in God or in chosen species. People will make the argument that if computers could paint, either: their paintings would not be “real” paintings, or that painting isn’t any more significant to being human than eating or sleeping.

Suchman’s list of shared assumptions of affective computing includes (one of four):

Emotional states and their affective expression can be understood in terms of their (evolutionary) utility, as a kind of primal but still functional ancestor of contemporary reason.

Sociability: examples: Stelarc’s Prosthetic Head, Cog, Kismet. In Strange Encounters “Sara Ahmed develops a critique of the figure of “the stranger” by extending Marx’ analysis of commodity fetishism– as the substitution of an enigmatic object for the social relations of labor – to include fantasy as well as materiality, or a “fetishism of figures”(2004:4). Animism, etc. Several ref. here: Gell, Frazer, Malinowski, Mauss. Frazer re: sympathetic magic might be noteworthy. Idol worship. “Alife discourses would seem to indicate that the project is less to displace an individualist conception of agency by a relational one, than to replicate the the biological individual in silicon. All else in traditional humanist understandings of the nature of agency remains intact.” Suchman discussion personal interactions with Stelarc, Stelarc’s prosthetic head, Cog, Kismet.

Some notes on “personhood” vs. “agency” ref. Strathern studies in Oceania.

Suggests “how we might differently conceptualize relations between humans and computational machines, as dynamic encounters of specifically situated persons with equally particular and culturally inflected things.” Suchman: If agency is no longer associated exclusively with being human, then that’s off the table and are short a distraction when discussing what being human means. “What if we understand persons as entities achieved only through the systematic enactment of separateness, and always in relation with others?”