Suchman Feminist STS and the Sciences of the Artificial

From Wikipedia:

"Suchman's book, Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-machine Communication (1987), provided intellectual foundations for the field of human-computer interaction (HCI). She challenged common assumptions behind the design of interactive systems with a cogent anthropological argument that human action is constantly constructed and reconstructed from dynamic interactions with the material and social worlds. The theory of situated cognition emphasizes the importance of the environment as an integral part of the cognitive process. She has made fundamental contributions to ethnographic analysis, conversational analysis and Participatory Design techniques for the development of interactive computer systems.^[2][4]
An updated version of the book was published in 2007. This second edition, called Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Action, included five new chapters exploring developments in the field of computing and social studies technology since the mid-1980s.^[2] Specifically, Suchman addressed the relationship and interactions between humans and machines with a focus on the new humanlike machines.^[5]
Lucy Suchman's research focus is on ethnographies behind technology and how technology has led to re-thinking of the relationship between feminist theory, anthropology and science.<sup>[6]"

139

 science technologies studies

"In that spirit, the aim of this chapter
is to offer an integrative reflection on engagements of feminist STS with recent developments
in a particular domain of science and technology, which I designate here as
the sciences of the artificial.1"

"Central projects are those collected
under the rubric of the cognitive sciences and their associated technologies, including
Artificial Intelligence (AI), robotics, and software agents as well as other forms of
embedded computing.2 Central concerns are changing conceptions of the sociomaterial
grounds of agency and lived experience, of bodies and persons, of resemblance
and difference, and of relations across the human/machine boundary."

Human and the computer

" The research considered here is distinguished
from technology studies more broadly by a critical engagement with (1)
technosciences founded on the trope of “information”; (2) artifacts that are “digital”
140
or computationally based, (3) a lineage involving automata or the creation of
machines in (a certain) image of the human and human capacities, and (4) analysis
informed by, or on my reading resonant with, feminist theorizing."

Feminist STS

"Feminist STS joins
with other recent scholarship in interrogating the conceptual and empirical grounds
of the collapsing but still potent boundary between those most foundational categories
of science and technology, that is, nature and culture.5 At least since Donna
Haraway’s famous intervention ([1985]1991), feminist scholars embrace as well the
increasingly evident inseparability of subjects and objects, “natural” bodies and “artificial”
augmentations. The study of those connections includes a concern with the
labors through which particular assemblages of persons and things come into being,
as well as the ways in which humans or nonhumans, cut off from the specific sites
and occasions that enliven them, become fetishized."
141
"politics of difference between nature and artifice, human and machine."

Deconstruct Simon?
"First, Simon’s phrase was assembled within a frame that set the “artificial”
in counterdistinction to the “natural” and then sought to define sciences of the
former modeled on what he took to be the foundational knowledge-making practices
of the latter. The work considered here, in contrast, is occupied with exploring the
premise that the boundary that Simon’s initiative was concerned to overcome—that
between nature and culture—is itself a result of historically specific practices of materially
based, imaginative artifice. Second, while Simon defined the “artificial” as made
up of systems formed in adaptive relations between “inner” and “outer” environments,
however defined, feminist STS joins with other modes of poststructuralist theorizing
to question the implied separation, and functional reintegration, of interiors
and exteriors that Simon’s framework implies."

" Rather, the focus is on practices through
which the boundary of entity and environment, affect and sociality, personal and
political emerges on particular occasions, and what it effects. Moreover, while Simon’s
project takes “information” as foundational, it is the history and contemporary workings
of that potent trope that forms the focus for the research considered here. And
finally, while Simon’s articulation of the sciences of the artificial took as its central
subject/object the universal figure of “man,” the work of feminist STS is to undo that
figure and the arrangements that it serves to keep in place."

142

Looking at interaction - human and machine


"critical debate with initiatives under the banner of the sciences of the artificial. I
turn first to the primary site of natural/cultural experimentation; namely, the project
of engineering the humanlike machine, in the form of artificially intelligent or expert
systems, robotics, and computationally based “software agents.” For STS scholars the
interest of this grand project, in its various forms, is less as a “science of the human”
than as a powerful disclosing agent for specific cultural assumptions regarding the
nature of the human and the foundations of humanness as a distinctive species property.
I turn next to developments in the area of human-machine mixings, rendered
iconic as the figure of the cyborg, and materialized most obviously in the case of
various bodily augmentations. I then expand the frame from the figure of the augmented
body to more extended arrangements of persons and things, which I discuss
under the heading of sociomaterial assemblages. I close with a reflection on the preconditions
and possibilities for generative critical exchange between feminist STS and
these contemporary technoscience initiatives."

" Her
argument is that AI builds its projects on deeply conservative foundations, drawn from
long-standing Western philosophical assumptions regarding the nature of human
intelligence. She examines the implications of this heritage by identifying assumptions
evident in AI writings and artifacts, and more revealingly, alternatives notable
for their absence. 
The alternatives are those developed, within feminist scholarship
and more broadly, that emphasize the specificity of the knowing, materially embodied
and socially embedded subject. The absence of that subject from AI discourses and
imaginaries, she observes, contributes among other things to the invisibility of a host
of requisite labors, of practical and corporeal care, essential to the progress of science."

143
Adam: Issues with SOAR - Carnegie Mellon and the way we define problem solving. 

"Soar became a basis for what Newell named in his 1990 book Unified
Theories of Cognition, though the project’s aims were subsequently qualified by
Newell’s students, who developed the system into a programming language and
associated “cognitive architectural framework” for a range of AI applications (Adam,
1998: 95)."

Adam: issues with CYc
"Lenat’s aim was to design and build an
encyclopedic database of propositional knowledge that could serve as a foundation
for expert systems. Intended to remedy the evident “brittleness” or narrowness of the
expert systems then under development, the premise of the Cyc project was that the
tremendous flexibility of human cognition was due to the availability, in the brain,
of an enormous repository of relevant knowledge. Neither generalized cognitive
processes nor specialized knowledge bases, Lenat argued, could finesse the absence of
such consensual, or “common sense,” knowledge."

144
" Adam observes that the Cyc project foundered on its assumption of the generalized
knower who, like the problem-solver figured in Soar, belies the contingent practices
of knowledge making. The common-sense knowledge base, intended to represent
“what everyone knows,” implicitly modeled relevant knowledge on the canonical
texts of the dictionary and encyclopedia. And charged with the task of knowing independently
of any practical purposes at hand, the project’s end point receded indefinitely
into a future horizon well beyond the already generous ten years originally
assigned it."

"came to the question
with an orientation to the primacy of communication, or interaction, to the emergence
of those particular capacities that have come to define the human. This emphasis
on sociality stood in strong contrast to my colleagues’ fixation on the individual
cognizer as the origin point for rational action. A growing engagement with anthropology
and with STS expanded the grounds for my critique and underscored the value
of close empirical investigations into the mundane ordering of sociomaterial practices."

We do a lot of stuff based on groups

"Initiatives in the participatory or cooperative design of information systems opened
up a further space for proactive experiments, during the 1990s, in the development
of an ethnographically informed and politically engaged design practice (Blomberg
et al., 1996; Suchman, 2002a,b). Most recently, my frame of reference has been further
expanded through the generative theorizing and innovative research practices of feminist
scholarship. Within this feminist frame, the universal human cognizer is progressively
displaced by attention to the specificities of knowing subjects, multiply and
differentially positioned, and variously engaged in reiterative and transformative activities
of collective world-making."

145
So cool!
"Forsythe’s critique is framed in terms of assumptions
regarding knowledge implicit in the knowledge engineering approach, including
the starting premise that knowledge exists in a stable and alienable form that is
in essence cognitive, available to “retrieval” and report, and applicable directly to practice.
In contrast she directs attention to the forms of knowing in practice that escape
expert reports and, consequently, the process of knowledge acquisition. Most importantly,
Forsythe points toward the still largely unexamined issue of the politics of
knowledge implied in expert systems projects."

146

Servant!!
"Domestic service, doubly invisible because (1) it is reproductive and (2) it takes place
in the household, is frequently provided by people—and of those predominately
women—who are displaced and desperate for employment. The latter are, moreover,
positioned as “others” to the dominant (typically white and affluent, at least in North
America and Europe) populace. Given the undesirability of service work, the conclusion
might be that the growth of the middle class will depend on the replacement of
human service providers by “smart” machines. Or this is the premise, at least, promoted
by those who are invested in the latter’s development (see Brooks, 2002). The
reality, however, is more likely to involve the continued labors of human service
providers."

 Yet as Ruth Schwartz
Cowan (1983) and others have demonstrated with respect to domestic appliances,
rather than a process of simple replacement, the delegation of new capacities to
machines simultaneously generates new forms of human labor as its precondition.

 lost body


147

"The first thing to note is that discoveries of the body in artificial intelligence and
robotics inevitably locate its importance vis-à-vis the successful operations of mind, or
at least of some form of instrumental cognition. The latter in this respect remains
primary, however much mind may be formed in and through the workings of embodied
action. The second consistent move is the positing of a “world” that preexists independent
of the body. Just as mind remains primary to body, the world remains prior
to and separate from perception and action, however much the latter may affect and
be affected by it. And both body and world remain a naturalized foundation for the
workings of mind."

148
But despite efforts by sympathetic critics
such as Adam and Kember to draw attention to the relevance of feminist theory for
AI and robotics, the environments of design return researchers from the rhetorics of
embodiment to the familiar practices of computer science and engineering. Brooks
embraces an idea of situated action as part of his campaign against representationalism
in AI, but Sengers (in press) observes that while references to the situated nature
of cognition and action have become “business as usual” within AI research,
researchers have for the most part failed to see the argument’s consequences for their
own relations to their research objects.

149
"In contrast to the easy promise of bodily augmentation, the fit of bodies
and artifacts is often less seamless and more painful than the trope would suggest. The
point is not, however, to demonize the prosthetic where formerly it was valorized but
rather to recognize the misalignments that inevitably exist within human/machine
syntheses and the labors and endurances required to accommodate them (see also
Viseu, 2005)."

Move away from "medical gaze"

"As Sara Diamond concisely states, it is
still the case within the so-called high tech and new media industries that “what kind
of work you perform depends, in great part, on how you are configured biologically
and positioned socially” (1997: 84)."

embodiment in cyberspace

150
“So how should
feminists contest the material and metaphoric grounds of human and machine identities,
human and machine relations?” (2003:176). In the remainder of this chapter I
offer some at least preliminary responses to that question, based in recent efforts to
reconfigure agencies at the human-machine interface, both materially and metaphorically,
in ways informed by feminist theorizing. The figure of the assemblage helps to
keep associations between humans and nonhumans as our basic unit of analysis.25




current surgery - screens - gaze has changed!


151
As Prentice observes of these boundary transformations: “When the patient’s
body is distributed by technology, the surgeon’s body reunites it through the circuit
of his or her own body” (2005: 8; see also Goodwin, in press.; Lenoir & Wei, 2002).
Myers (2005) explores the transformation of body boundaries that occurs as molecular
biologists incorporate knowledge of protein structures through their engagement
with physical and virtual models. Interactive molecular graphics technologies, she
argues, afford crystallographers the experience of handling and manipulating otherwise
intangible protein structures. The process of learning those structures involves
not simply mentation but a reconfiguration of the scientist’s body, as “protein
modelers can be understood to ‘dilate’ and extend their bodies into the prosthetic
technologies offered by computer graphics, and ‘interiorize’ the products of their
body-work as embodied models of molecular structure” (in press). The result, she proposes,
is a kind of “animate assemblage” of continually shifting and progressively
deepening competency, enabled through the prosthetic conjoining of persons and
things.

Fascinating
gamers

152

Issues of engagement 

 "the disciplines and projects that currently dominate professional sites of
technology production are narrowly circumscribed, and the expected form of engagement
is that of service to established agendas."


"In response to this essay, I have suggested
that recent reconceptualizations of ethnographic practice, from distanced
description to an engagement in multiple, partial, unfolding, and differentially powerful
narratives can help recast the anthropologist’s dilemma (Suchman, 1999a)."

153
 "My aim in this chapter has been to draw out a sense of the critical exchange emerging
in feminist-inspired STS encounters with new digital technologies and the plethora
of configurations that they have materialized. This exchange involves a spectrum of
engagements, from questions regarding received assumptions to dialogic interventions
and more directly experimental alternatives. Theoretically, this body of research
explores the rewriting of old boundaries of human and nonhuman."</sup>