Category: technology

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Disciplining theory(?) – post-phenomenology(dot-org)

The website postphenomenology.org is an interesting resource, especially the bibliography compiled there (which perhaps implies an canon?), which got me returning to some thoughts I’ve had about how particular kinds of theory ‘travel’, how they co-opted and then, perhaps, disciplined. The website mentioned above is clearly, if not wholly explicitly, positioned within that interesting, apparently interdisciplinary, area of Science and Technology Studies – and one would think, then, that the reference list would take in a range of disciplinary debates, demonstrating how the ideas freighted by “post-phenomenology” have, perhaps, contributed to an interdisciplinary debate. Instead, it seem to me, the reference list demonstrates something like a kind of disciplining, whereby the journals and authors represented sit within what is de facto a particular field, potentially having not an open, interdisciplinary, debate but rather a fairly insular one. I don’t intend that observation as a slight to the compilers of what is a useful resource, I’m just interested in how the movement or spread of ideas can work – or, as Said says, how theory travels.

This cannot be uncommon, nor is it necessarily a normatively ‘bad’ thing. Recently I took part in a fascinating workshop on the generations of Southern theory – in relation to urbanism and in particular in relation to how this has historically played out through the empirical lens and academic institutions of South Africa. My colleague Clive Barnett highlighted that that set of debates has happened slightly differently (or perhaps not at all) in different but cognate disciplinary contexts. In the wake of Said and various others, Clive has, of course, written about such things – as have many others!

So, what should ‘post-phenomenological’ geographers do? Probably just carry on… One could try and forge the connections, but it of course takes effort and time etc etc. In the end, nobody ‘owns’ concepts and the theory will develop within different disciplinary contexts, albeit possibly siloed into particular journals and conferences. I suppose, it goes to show that when conversations become more than superficially interdisciplinary, taking in different points of view and contexts, it’s probably a precious moment…

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Reblog> Workshop on Security and the Political Turn in the Philosophy of Technologies

An interesting event blogged by Peter-Paul Verbeek:

Workshop ‘Security and the Political Turn in the Philosophy of Technologies’, University of Twente | DesignLab, March 10 2017. How to understand the political significance of things? And how to deal with the politics of technology in a responsible way? Ever since Langdon Winner claimed in the early 1980s that “artifacts have politics”, these questions have been puzzling philosophers and ethicists of technology. Technologies are not just instruments for humans to do politics but actively shape politics themselves. In this workshop we will explore various dimensions of this political role of technologies, especially with regards to security, citizenship in a technological world, and the role of social media and ‘fake news’ in contemporary democracy.

Speakers include:

  • Babette Babich (Fordham)
  • Robin James (UNCC),
  • Laura Fichtner (TUD)
  • Wolter Pieters (TUD)
  • Melis Bas (UT)
  • Jonne Hoek (UT)
  • Philip Brey (UT)
  • Nolen Gertz (UT)
  • Michael Nagenborg (UT)
  • Peter-Paul Verbeek (UT)

The workshop is sponsored by the 4TU.Ethics working group on “Risk, Safety, and Security.”

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“Do you hear voices? You do. So you are possessed” – @mikedotphillips talk @exetergeography

I’m really pleased to share that Prof. Mike Phillips (i-DAT, Plymouth) will be speaking  next week as part of the Exeter Geography seminar series. Mike is a founder of the Institute of Digital Art and Technology and one of the founders of the undergraduate programme I studied MediaLab Arts, which is now called  Digital Media Design.

Details: Thursday 16th March, 12:30: Amory 417. All welcome!

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Automation in financial services and the ongoing re-imagination of work

From Technology outsmarts the human investor – FT

“It just gets harder and harder and harder,” reflected one money manager this week. His is the predicament of other professionals – anything done by a person that follows a pattern and can be coded into a form that a computer understands will soon get squeezed. Technology also has the advantage identified in 1970: algorithms stay constantly alert.

It does not imply the complete death – or automation – of the investment manager. A professional can still undertake original research on a company or a security that provides insight. As more of the market becomes automated, originality becomes rarer and more valuable: an idiosyncratic investor should achieve higher returns by standing out from the robotic crowd.

Nor can algorithmic efficiency be wholly divorced from human intelligence, as the Oregon study showed – the point was that humans needed to set parameters for computers to follow. Many asset managers use analysts and researchers to build investment models that then trade securities automatically; others blend their active risk-taking with passive elements.

…

But these difficulties demonstrate how automation eats into professions, not by taking away all the jobs in one day but by unbundling them – dividing them between tasks that only humans can perform and those of which an algorithm is quite capable. Then the boundary relentlessly shifts.

The last paragraph is key – there seems to be a growing consensus that automation doesn’t simply ‘destroy’ jobs, it makes particular aspects of or kinds of role redundant and the implementation and development of automated systems requires the remaining workers to fit around those systems in different ways. In many ways, then, automation is a company or institution-specifc organisational or administrative problem as well as a wider political economic problem.

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Reblog> Book Launch: Playful Mapping in the Digital Age

Via Institute of Network Cultures.

Generally wary of anything with “digital age” in the title, but good to see some geographers featuring in ‘digital cultures’ type networks…

Book Launch Playful Mapping in the Digital Age

MONDAY 13TH OF MARCH, 17:00 – 18:15 @SPUI25, AMSTERDAM.

With keynote lectures by Michiel de Lange and, Emma Fraser and Clancy Wilmott.

From Mah-Jong to the introduction of Prussian war-games, through to the emergence of location-based play: maps and play share a long and diverse history. In this programme, we will launch the book Playful Mapping in The Digital Age, which shows how playing and mapping can be liberating, dangerous, subversive and, performative.

>> Sign up here.

Playful Mapping in the Digital Age shows how mapping and playing unfold in the digital age and in which ways the relations between these apparently separate tropes are increasingly woven together. Fluid networks of interaction have encouraged a proliferation of hybrid forms of mapping and playing. A rich plethora of contemporary case-studies, ranging from fieldwork, golf, activism and automotive navigation to pervasive and desktop-based games, emphasizes this trend. Examining these cases shows how mapping and playing can form productive synergies, but also encourages new ways of being, knowing and shaping our everyday lives. This afternoon, the Members of the Playful Mapping Collective explore how play can be more than just an object or practice, and instead focus on its potential as a method for understanding maps and spatiality.

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AI under feminist scrutiny

Searching for something else, I came across a 1999 book review by Tiziana Terranova of Alison Adam’s book Artifical Knowing in New Media and Society. As with much of Terranova’s incisive writing, there is a set of observations about the ontological politics of technology studies, in this case a really interesting reflection on how we might understand the issue of embodiment in relation to mediation:

…although embodiment is a foundational feminist category, it is far from being a resolved question. It is much easier to charge malestream science and technology with disembodiment than to come up with a model of embodiment which won’t stir the opposition of this or that feminist quarter. In many ways, the debate about cyberculture and technology keeps stumbling against the same block: if disembodiment is preferential bias of cybernetic technologies, how do we anser that? How do we bring back the body in cyberspace without essentializing it? Interestingly… if [we see] in Harraway’s cyborg (directly inspired by the skewed, labarynthine technologic of cybernetics) a machinic assemblage of organic and inorganics, of identity and difference, maybe [we] could have come up with a constructive, non-essentialist, embodied model of AI. Maybe it is a sad testimony of the overuse of the term ‘cyborg’ that [some are] all to ready to dismiss it as another ruse of an a-political postmodern feminism. It is a pity indeed since it seems to me that the charge of disembodiment more and more often levelled at digital culture (in all its manifestiations) has turned into the final word on the latter rather the beginning of a really different understanding of technology and subjectivity (or in this case, ‘intelligence’). Maybe we need a model of embodiment which is more about connections and partialities, more akin to cybernetics itself, to make AI work for feminists. (p. 142)

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Material carriers of thought

In a recent article on the Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective, Lyudmila A. Markova discusses the material supports for human communication, what Stiegler would call the processes of exteriorisation and thus materialisation of memory/thought:

Even the most common type of communication is not possible without a material carrier. For example, at a minimum stone, papyrus or paper is required for written communication. Their production processes obey the laws of engineering sciences, which are completely independent from the content of the information they convey. Even if the information is transmitted orally, with a voice, a material carrier is present. The sound is produced in a person’s larynx and is uttered through the mouth as language. Furthermore, the air movement, which is born inevitably during the conversation, obeys the laws of physics.

There’s some really interesting discussion of the various ways those involved in studies of social epistemology, and most notably in the essay it’s Steve Fuller’s work set in relation to Kuhn, have attempted to reconcile the passage to knowledge. It’s also curious to see how David Berry’s work ends up in there too, I suspect there’s more than a hint of Stiegler shining through there (but I haven’t read the work so should probably do so…) and it’s a shame Markova doesn’t make that connection. Might be interesting to pursue that angle…

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Echoborg

Former colleagues of mine at UWE are developing an interesting project, which you may have seen/heard about through the BBC’s Click programme, called Echoborg.

An echoborg is a hybrid agent composed of the body of a real person and the “mind” (or, rather, the words) of a conversational agent; the words the echoborg speaks are determined by the conversational agent, transmitted to the person via a covert audio-relay apparatus, and articulated by the person through speech shadowing[1].

Recently, the project team have demoed the project as part of an AHRC-funded network on Automation Anxiety and have written this up on the project website, here’s a snippet – it sounds like it is really compelling (I’ve not seen this in action):

Four people were interviewed by the AI which increasingly displayed an interest in eliciting help to reprogram itself. Proceedings were visible on a projector screen and the ‘audience’ of applicants gradually began to discuss the situation of the Echoborg and how to change it. At a certain point their reflections passed a threshold and the group fired into collective action, experimenting with various methods to bring the situation to a head in some way. The lively inventiveness of the group and the individual interviewees went a long way to confirming the interactive potential of this format of the work. It also gave Rik and Phil much to work with in considering the further development of the AI/Chatbot, the restricted delivery of narrative by the human Echoborg and the staging. This event also trialled a secondary, higher level, Echoborg character as part of the slow process of unfolding the potential for this Echoborg recruitment event to be a disruptive and thought and emotion provoking experience for all players.

Notes

  1. Corti, Kevin and Gillespie, Alex (2015) Offscreen and in the chair next to you: conversational agents speaking through actual human bodies. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 9238 . pp. 405-417.