Excerpt
By a strange twist of fate, I read this book while on a visit to the Falkland Islands, where the British victory over Argentina in the 1982 war feels as though it might have happened last week.
This book came up during the film festival discussions, and it brings up some interesting questions around ‘moral decisions’ being made by ‘machines’. Yet, even writing these words makes me come back again to this quote from Hayles:
‘distributed cognition replaces autonomous will’ (Hayles 1999: 288)
Thinking back to the aircraft/pilot example from Miller (2011: 211), I continue to reflect on this idea of decision-making being distributed across human and non-human actors as I read this dialogue between Albert Borgmann and N. Katherine Hayles on humans and machines.
This is helping me to further deconstruct and question the idea of ‘autonomous will’, the boundaries of the ‘human subject’ and the notion that agency lies with either ‘human’ or ‘machine’, reflecting instead on this concept of distributed cognition.