Human-machine reconfigurations: Plans and situated actions.
It can be argued that there is a fixation with automata and ‘efforts to establish criteria of humanness’ have been debated for a while. Suchman suggests that our concern with human figural images of autonomy and rational agency are echoes in our artificial intelligence projects. Agency has been a crucial signifier in differentiating between humans and machines. Humans have the mental complexity to and emotional range to make our own decisions and respond accordingly. Practices regarding a spectrum of automata and the reverse have been a topic of study for a long time as ‘Historian Jessica Riskin traces projects concerned with the synthesis of artificial life forms – artifacts that act in ways taken to be humanlike – since the early eighteenth century’. Riskin pin points Vaucanson’s “defecating duck” as the point in which interest in automata started growing. Suchman goes on to suggest three categories that define ‘humanness in contemporary AI projects: embodiment, emotion, and sociality’.
Affective computing is an area of AI ‘concerned with gathering data from faces, voices and body language to measure human emotion’ and respond in some way to a said stimulus. With emotion being one of the key identifiers of humanness, affective computing is an attempt to turn computers into ‘perceptive actors in human society’
Suchman brings to our attention ’normative readings developed based on experimenters’ prior experience and cumulative data. And as inevitably, particularly in the context of the early twentieth century, when these experiments flourished, categories of emotion were mapped to categories of person’. Positioning men on one side and women and black women on the other, I find it particularly interesting that the word emotional is being used in conjunction with words describing the logical and mechanic. For a very long-time expressing emotion has been considered a women trait with negative implications. The word emotional has been weaponized to reduce and remove women from any base or pedigree. It has been used to shame women into lesser positions in society as wells as silence and stunt growth of many men. It can be considered ironic that emotion has been positioned as the ‘missing ingredient to comprehensive and fully responsive robots.
According to Suchman ‘the promise is that, as the observer that never blinks, the perceptual computer interface is positioned to know us better than we know ourselves’. This is exemplified in MIT’s celebrity robots Cog and Kismet, a reaction to ‘humanness as embodiment, affect and interactivity’. Suchman concludes that ‘various representational media’ act as smokes and mirrors and turn ‘extensive networks and intensive hours of human labor’ into ‘rendered eternally and autonomously operational’. What is portrayed as one thing has been positioned that way purposely and strategically but can only hold up in one light. This sentiment is echoed in her trip to visit Cog as re-recalls being underwhelmed by the sight of wires and hardware. The wires and hardware are identifiers and reminders of an ‘extended network of human labors and affiliated technologies that afford Cog its agency’.
She concludes with a Physician's account of trying to keep a premature baby alive and says ‘it is the baby who as the physician phrases it, “decides” its future.’ This position acknowledges the baby as an ‘integral part’ of a ‘sociotechnical network’ that then has agency over it’s future. The ‘sociotechnical network’ is the enabling entity that provides the baby with the collective agency. This is the same for Cog and Kismet as the networks they are part of empower them allowing collective agency.
The Algorithmic Fashion Companion in relation to Lucy Suchman’s essay.
The profession of being a stylist or designer can be considered subjective, it comes down to taste and personal preference. However, social media has allowed brands to monitor, create and make money from social trends based on a wealth of personal information. The act of computer systems putting together outfits for the mases has limited emotional regard in the traditional sense. Although it is a step towards automata, I do not think it is in the same vain mentioned by Lucy Suchman in her essay. It automates a human act and discovers good vs. bad though human input but the main focus here is to increase efficiency. In this instance emotion is not necessary however taste becomes important. This human trait can be translated into an ever changing good and bad as momentary fact, thus recommending outfits that a specific customer profile might like. With this being said the accuracy rate of the algorithm always creating a good outfit is not 100 percent and that can be attributed to the lack of humanness when it comes to emotion and intuition. Human agency allows for more personal and dynamic choices
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