Today marks the end of an exciting first week!
Before we started, I set up Twitter, YouTube, SoundCloud and Pocket feeds and shared resources on artifical intelligence embracing social science, machines and cognition, posthumanism and a track and article demonstrating music and algorithms. This mix was intended to test out different feeds and save/share content to revisit later.
I began the first day reflecting on a short clip from Blade Runner, referencing the ‘more human than human’ quote mentioned in the Miller (2011) reading. As I worked through the readings and films, contemplating on the figure of the ‘cyborg’ through Haraway, I reconsidered my assumptions about the boundaries between ‘human’ and ‘machine’. This theme kept cropping up, while looking at the Voight-Kampff test in Blade Runner and during a Twitter exchange about ‘testing’ for a ‘human’.
This ‘human’/‘machine’ boundary was just one assumption I found myself deconstructing, encouraged by Sterne (2006: 24) to question, examine and reclassify categories and boundaries and avoid importing existing biases. Thinking about ‘feedback loops’ and questioning the ‘boundaries of the autonomous subject’ (Hayles 1999: 2) brought me to this video, and inspired my header image (the Mandelbrot set), a visualisation created through feedback and iteration. I went on to explore posthumanism through videos and readings from Braidotti and Hayles, reconsidering my ideas about autonomous will and the neutrality of the term ‘human’.
My journey this week had tangents (including the #AlgorithmsForHer conference) which I hope to revisit. I’ve sketched out my journey below…
Super to see your lifestream up and running, and in a very organised way! Great to see the menus and tags – this will definitely help with navigation. You’ve got five pages of feed items already, which is fantastic, but it will also be useful to continue to think about how you are going to manage this archive.
Good to see this end-of-week summary in place too, and it is doing precisely the right things: reflecting on feeds and specific feed items, and making connections between your various explorations and the course themes and readings. Keep this up!
‘I reconsidered my assumptions about the boundaries between ‘human’ and ‘machine’. This theme kept cropping up, while looking at the Voight-Kampff test in Blade Runner ‘
Yes, it is interesting that Blade Runner emphasises how difficult it is to tell the difference, which seems to be as much about the complexity of the replicants as it is about our own difficulty in identifying what makes ‘us’ us. It is also notable that the test needs a human (if we believe all blade runners are human), it doesn’t seem to be automated.
I suppose one might say that this boundary is often portrayed as rather hard in education; education is something very ‘human’ for which we might make use of external tools.
Super map of your journey – it will be useful to revisit this later in the course, or perhaps add to it.
Thank you for your comments, Jeremy! Much appreciated.
It would be great to revisit the map later – it felt quite a ‘messy’ (albeit positive!) process drawing it, and it raised a lot of questions in my mind which I hope to keep looking at.
It’s been really interesting to think about this idea of what we consider makes us ‘human’, as well as the contested nature that the term is ‘neutral’ and the inclusions and exclusions it is loaded with (a video from Braidotti in my lifestream kept bringing me back to that!).
I’ve also been trying to question my assumptions about the ‘human’ being at the centre of education, with technologies as a ‘tool’, and think more in terms of the complexity and entanglement described by Bayne (2015: 18) and distributed cognition mentioned in Hayles (1999: 288). It’s all certainly making me reconsider my assumptions about power relations and agency here, so I’ll try to keep questioning!