Co-authored with Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal and Théo Lepage-Richer
Neural Networks proposes to recon... more Co-authored with Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal and Théo Lepage-Richer
Neural Networks proposes to reconstruct situated practices, social histories, mediating techniques, and ontological assumptions that inform the computational project of the same name. If so-called machine learning comprises a statistical approach to pattern extraction, then neural networks can be defined as a biologically inspired model that relies on probabilistically weighted neuron-like units to identify such patterns. Far from signaling the ultimate convergence of human and machine intelligence, however, neural networks highlight the technologization of neurophysiology that characterizes virtually all strands of neuroscientific and AI research of the past century. Taking this traffic as its starting point, this volume explores how cognition came to be constructed as essentially computational in nature, to the point of underwriting a technologized view of human biology, psychology, and sociability, and how countermovements provide resources for thinking otherwise.
in conversation with Caja Thimm
Starting with her early works on “Talk with Machines” (1986, rep... more in conversation with Caja Thimm
Starting with her early works on “Talk with Machines” (1986, republished in 2021) and her books Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication (1987) and Human-Machine Reconfigurations (2007a), Lucy Suchman not only opened up a new domain of scientific interest in humans and technology, but also showed how the scope of human machine relations needs to be reconceptualized. With her most recent works (2023a, 2023b), she not only widens the perspective on the contexts for machine usage, particularly by the military, but she also gives insights on how to conceptualize AI in terms of its ontological status and its agency. Discussing the relevance of the concept of autonomy for relations between humans and machines, Lucy Suchman clearly positions herself in the debate and demonstrates how we need to reconfigure and address so-called machine autonomy.
This commentary starts with the question ‘How is it that AI has come to be figured uncontroversia... more This commentary starts with the question ‘How is it that AI has come to be figured uncontroversially as a thing, however many controversies “it” may engender?’ Addressing this question takes us to knowledge practices that philosopher of science Helen Verran has named a ‘hardening of the categories’, processes that not only characterise the onto-epistemology of AI but also are central to its constituent techniques and technologies. In a context where the stabilization of AI as a figure enables further investments in associated techniques and technologies, AI's status as controversial works to reiterate both its ontological status and its agency. It follows that interventions into the field of AI controversies that fail to trouble and destabilise the figure of AI risk contributing to its uncontroversial reproduction. This is not to deny the proliferating data and compute-intensive techniques and technologies that travel under the sign of AI but rather to call for a keener focus on their locations, politics, material-semiotic specificity, and effects, including their ongoing enactment as a singular and controversial object.
As a contribution to the CCW’s third informal meeting of experts on lethal autonomous weapon syst... more As a contribution to the CCW’s third informal meeting of experts on lethal autonomous weapon systems (LAWS), this briefing paper focuses on the implications of the requirement of situational awareness for autonomous action – whether by humans, machines or complex human-machine systems. For the purposes of this paper, ‘autonomy’ refers to self-directed action, and more specifically the action-according-to-rule that comprises military discipline. Unlike the algorithmic sense of a rule as that term is used in Artificial Intelligence (AI), military rules always require interpretation in relation to a specific situation, or situational awareness. Focusing on the principle of distinction, I argue that International Humanitarian Law (IHL) presupposes capacities of situational awareness that it does not, and cannot, fully specify. At the same time, autonomy or ‘self-direction’ in the case of machines requires the adequate specification (by human designers) of the conditions under which asso...
The current reanimation of artificial intelligence includes a resurgence of investment in automat... more The current reanimation of artificial intelligence includes a resurgence of investment in automating military intelligence on the part of the US Department of Defense. A series of programs set forth a technopolitical imaginary of fully integrated, comprehensive and real-time ‘situational awareness’ across US theaters of operation. Locating this imaginary within the history of ‘closed world’ discourse, I offer a critical reading of dominant scholarship within military circles that sets out the military’s cybernetic model of situational awareness in the form of the widely referenced Observe, Orient, Decide, Act or OODA Loop. I argue that the loop’s promise of dynamic homeostasis is held in place by the enduring premise of objectivist knowledge, enabled through a war apparatus that treats the contingencies and ambiguities of relations on the ground as noise from which a stable and unambiguous signal can be extracted. In contrast, recent challenges to the closed-world imaginary, based on critical scholarship and investigative journalism, suggest that the aspiration to closure is an engine for the continued destructiveness of US interventions and the associated regeneration of enmity. To challenge these technopolitics of violence we need a radically different kind of situational awareness, one that recognizes the place of ignorance in perpetuating the project of militarism. Only that kind of awareness can inform the public debate required to re-envision a future place for the US in the world, founded in alternative investments in demilitarization and commitments to our collective security.
Available online at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21624887.2020.1760587. If you ar... more Available online at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21624887.2020.1760587. If you are unable to access this journal through your library or affiliate institution, please email the author for a preprint.
This article aims to integrate two interrelated strands in critical security studies. The first is mounting evidence for the fallacy of claims for precision and accuracy in the United States ‘counterterrorism’ programme, particularly as it involves expanding aerial surveillance in support of operations of extrajudicial assassination. The second line of critical analysis concerns growing investment in the further automation of these operations, more specifically in the form of the US Department of Defense Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team, or Project Maven. Building upon generative intersections of critical security studies and science and technology studies (STS), I argue that the promotion of automated data analysis under the sign of artificial intelligence can only serve to exacerbate military operations that are at once discriminatory and indiscriminate in their targeting, while remaining politically and legally unaccountable.
This introduction to the special issue of the same title sets out the context for a critical exam... more This introduction to the special issue of the same title sets out the context for a critical examination of contemporary developments in sociotechnical systems deployed in the name of security. Our focus is on technologies of tracking, with their claims to enable the identification of those who comprise legitimate targets for the use of violent force. Taking these claims as deeply problematic, we join a growing body of scholarship on the technopolitical logics that underpin an increasingly violent landscape of institutions, infrastructures, and actions, promising protection to some but arguably contributing to our collective insecurity. We examine the asymmetric distributions of sociotechnologies of (in)security; their deadly and injurious effects; and the legal, ethical, and moral questions that haunt their operations.
This paper draws on archival materials to read two demonstrations of FlatWorld, an immersive mili... more This paper draws on archival materials to read two demonstrations of FlatWorld, an immersive military training simulation developed between 2001 and 2007 at the University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies. The first demonstration is a video recording of a guided tour of the system, staged by its designers in 2005. The second is a documentary created by the US Public Broadcasting Service as part of their “embedded” media coverage of the system while it was installed at California’s Camp Pendleton in 2007. I critically attend to the imaginaries that are realized in the simulation’s figurations of places and (raced, gendered) bodies, as well as its storylines. This is part of a wider project of understanding how distinctions between the real and the virtual are effectively elided in technoscientific military discourses, in the interest of recognizing real/virtual entanglements while also reclaiming the differences that matter.
This essay sets out the motivating questions and initial analytic framing of research in progress... more This essay sets out the motivating questions and initial analytic framing of research in progress on the problem of ‘situational awareness’ within contemporary forms of (particularly U.S.) warfare. The focus more specifically is on the logics, cultural imaginaries and material practices of remotely-controlled weapon systems (particularly armed drones and weaponized robots). Drawing from reports in investigative journalism, military documents, and critical scholarship, I examine connections between the emphasis in military and security discourses on keeping ‘our’ bodies safe through so called network-centric warfare, and the project of cutting the networks that might bring our wars too close to home.
This article takes as a touchstone the concept of location as it has been articulated through ant... more This article takes as a touchstone the concept of location as it has been articulated through anthropology’s reflections on its history and positioning as a field, and in relation to shifting engagements with contemporary technoscientific, political, and ethical problems. A second touchstone is one specific anthropological relocation—that is, into worlds of professional technology design. With figures of location and design in play, I describe some perspicuous moments that proved both generative and problematic in my own experience of establishing terms of engagement between anthropology and design. Though design has been considered recently as a model for anthropology’s future, I argue instead that it is best positioned as a problematic object for an anthropology of the contemporary. In writing about design’s limits, my argument is that, like anthropology, design needs to acknowledge the specificities of its place, to locate itself as one (albeit multiple) figure and practice of transformation.
Written as the introduction to a special issue of Body & Society on the topic of animation and au... more Written as the introduction to a special issue of Body & Society on the topic of animation and automation, this article considers the interrelation of those two terms through readings of relevant work in film studies and science and technology studies (STS), inflected through recent scholarship on the body. Drawing upon historical and contemporary examples, we trace how movement is
This article explores the resonating figures of primate, child, and robot in contemporary technos... more This article explores the resonating figures of primate, child, and robot in contemporary technoscientific corporealizations of the ‘almost human’. We take as our model (in)organism ‘Lucy the Robot Orangutan’, roboticist Steve Grand’s project to create an artificial life form with a mind of its own. One aspect of Lucy’s figuration by Grand, we argue, which ties her to Haraway’s analysis of the primate, is of the robot as a model for animal, and more specifically (or aspirationally) human, cognition. We follow the trope of ‘model organism’ as it is under discussion within science and technology studies and as an ironic descriptor for our own interest in Lucy as an entity/project through which to illuminate figurations within robotics more widely. Primate and robot together are forms of natureculture that help to clarify how the categories of animal and machine are entangled, while making explicit investments in their differences from one another, and from the third category of the human. We conclude, again following Haraway, by imagining what other possibilities there might be for figuring humans, robots, and their relations if we escape the reiterative imaginary of the robot as proxy for becoming human.
The focus of my inquiry in this article is the figure of the Human that is enacted in the design ... more The focus of my inquiry in this article is the figure of the Human that is enacted in the design of the humanoid robot. The humanoid or anthropomorphic robot is a model (in)organism, engineered in the roboticist's laboratory in ways that both align with and diverge from the model organisms of biology. Like other model organisms, the laboratory robot's life is inextricably infused with its inherited materialities and with the ongoing-or truncated-labours of its affiliated humans. But while animal models are rendered progressively more standardised and replicable as tools for the biological sciences, the humanoid robot is individuated and naturalised. Three stagings of humanrobot encounters (with the robots Mertz, Kismet and Robota respectively) demonstrate different possibilities for conceptualising these subject objects, for the claims about humanness that they corporealise, and for the kinds of witnessing that they presuppose.
Abstract. Through the case of a particular organization devoted to technological research and dev... more Abstract. Through the case of a particular organization devoted to technological research and development, this paper investigates how values of the 'new' operate in what Appadurai (1986) has characterized as the social life of objects. Drawing on previous scholarship in ...
Technology Analysis & Strategic Management, 2000
Based on research experience within US corporations, this paper examines the rhetoric and practic... more Based on research experience within US corporations, this paper examines the rhetoric and practices of organizational and technological 'innovation'. Our aim is to identify discourses of innovation as a site for critical studies. Two cases are used to illustrate ways in which initiatives launched in the name of change are based in traditional cultural frames that work in practice to conserve existing institutional orders. We close with some observations on alternative, indigenous sources of innovation and the conditions required to sustain them.
Within the past 10 years, some new dialogues (or more accurately, multilogues) have opened up amo... more Within the past 10 years, some new dialogues (or more accurately, multilogues) have opened up among researchers in psychology, anthropology, sociology, linguistics, philosophy, and computer science. Some of those who have participated in these ...
The critique presented in Suchman (1994a) was motivated by two central premises of CSCW research.... more The critique presented in Suchman (1994a) was motivated by two central premises of CSCW research. First, that designers of CSCW systems are designers of organizational life, through the systems that they build. 1 Second, that CSCW technologies require the ...
Journal of the American Statistical Association, 1990
Interactional Troubles In Face-to-Face Survey Interviews LUCY SUCHMAN and BRIGITTE JORDAN' 1... more Interactional Troubles In Face-to-Face Survey Interviews LUCY SUCHMAN and BRIGITTE JORDAN' 1. INTERVIEWS AS INTERACTION For statistically based social science, survey research is the principal means of obtaining data about the social world. The interview from this ...
Co-authored with Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal and Théo Lepage-Richer
Neural Networks proposes to recon... more Co-authored with Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal and Théo Lepage-Richer
Neural Networks proposes to reconstruct situated practices, social histories, mediating techniques, and ontological assumptions that inform the computational project of the same name. If so-called machine learning comprises a statistical approach to pattern extraction, then neural networks can be defined as a biologically inspired model that relies on probabilistically weighted neuron-like units to identify such patterns. Far from signaling the ultimate convergence of human and machine intelligence, however, neural networks highlight the technologization of neurophysiology that characterizes virtually all strands of neuroscientific and AI research of the past century. Taking this traffic as its starting point, this volume explores how cognition came to be constructed as essentially computational in nature, to the point of underwriting a technologized view of human biology, psychology, and sociability, and how countermovements provide resources for thinking otherwise.
in conversation with Caja Thimm
Starting with her early works on “Talk with Machines” (1986, rep... more in conversation with Caja Thimm
Starting with her early works on “Talk with Machines” (1986, republished in 2021) and her books Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication (1987) and Human-Machine Reconfigurations (2007a), Lucy Suchman not only opened up a new domain of scientific interest in humans and technology, but also showed how the scope of human machine relations needs to be reconceptualized. With her most recent works (2023a, 2023b), she not only widens the perspective on the contexts for machine usage, particularly by the military, but she also gives insights on how to conceptualize AI in terms of its ontological status and its agency. Discussing the relevance of the concept of autonomy for relations between humans and machines, Lucy Suchman clearly positions herself in the debate and demonstrates how we need to reconfigure and address so-called machine autonomy.
This commentary starts with the question ‘How is it that AI has come to be figured uncontroversia... more This commentary starts with the question ‘How is it that AI has come to be figured uncontroversially as a thing, however many controversies “it” may engender?’ Addressing this question takes us to knowledge practices that philosopher of science Helen Verran has named a ‘hardening of the categories’, processes that not only characterise the onto-epistemology of AI but also are central to its constituent techniques and technologies. In a context where the stabilization of AI as a figure enables further investments in associated techniques and technologies, AI's status as controversial works to reiterate both its ontological status and its agency. It follows that interventions into the field of AI controversies that fail to trouble and destabilise the figure of AI risk contributing to its uncontroversial reproduction. This is not to deny the proliferating data and compute-intensive techniques and technologies that travel under the sign of AI but rather to call for a keener focus on their locations, politics, material-semiotic specificity, and effects, including their ongoing enactment as a singular and controversial object.
As a contribution to the CCW’s third informal meeting of experts on lethal autonomous weapon syst... more As a contribution to the CCW’s third informal meeting of experts on lethal autonomous weapon systems (LAWS), this briefing paper focuses on the implications of the requirement of situational awareness for autonomous action – whether by humans, machines or complex human-machine systems. For the purposes of this paper, ‘autonomy’ refers to self-directed action, and more specifically the action-according-to-rule that comprises military discipline. Unlike the algorithmic sense of a rule as that term is used in Artificial Intelligence (AI), military rules always require interpretation in relation to a specific situation, or situational awareness. Focusing on the principle of distinction, I argue that International Humanitarian Law (IHL) presupposes capacities of situational awareness that it does not, and cannot, fully specify. At the same time, autonomy or ‘self-direction’ in the case of machines requires the adequate specification (by human designers) of the conditions under which asso...
The current reanimation of artificial intelligence includes a resurgence of investment in automat... more The current reanimation of artificial intelligence includes a resurgence of investment in automating military intelligence on the part of the US Department of Defense. A series of programs set forth a technopolitical imaginary of fully integrated, comprehensive and real-time ‘situational awareness’ across US theaters of operation. Locating this imaginary within the history of ‘closed world’ discourse, I offer a critical reading of dominant scholarship within military circles that sets out the military’s cybernetic model of situational awareness in the form of the widely referenced Observe, Orient, Decide, Act or OODA Loop. I argue that the loop’s promise of dynamic homeostasis is held in place by the enduring premise of objectivist knowledge, enabled through a war apparatus that treats the contingencies and ambiguities of relations on the ground as noise from which a stable and unambiguous signal can be extracted. In contrast, recent challenges to the closed-world imaginary, based on critical scholarship and investigative journalism, suggest that the aspiration to closure is an engine for the continued destructiveness of US interventions and the associated regeneration of enmity. To challenge these technopolitics of violence we need a radically different kind of situational awareness, one that recognizes the place of ignorance in perpetuating the project of militarism. Only that kind of awareness can inform the public debate required to re-envision a future place for the US in the world, founded in alternative investments in demilitarization and commitments to our collective security.
Available online at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21624887.2020.1760587. If you ar... more Available online at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21624887.2020.1760587. If you are unable to access this journal through your library or affiliate institution, please email the author for a preprint.
This article aims to integrate two interrelated strands in critical security studies. The first is mounting evidence for the fallacy of claims for precision and accuracy in the United States ‘counterterrorism’ programme, particularly as it involves expanding aerial surveillance in support of operations of extrajudicial assassination. The second line of critical analysis concerns growing investment in the further automation of these operations, more specifically in the form of the US Department of Defense Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team, or Project Maven. Building upon generative intersections of critical security studies and science and technology studies (STS), I argue that the promotion of automated data analysis under the sign of artificial intelligence can only serve to exacerbate military operations that are at once discriminatory and indiscriminate in their targeting, while remaining politically and legally unaccountable.
This introduction to the special issue of the same title sets out the context for a critical exam... more This introduction to the special issue of the same title sets out the context for a critical examination of contemporary developments in sociotechnical systems deployed in the name of security. Our focus is on technologies of tracking, with their claims to enable the identification of those who comprise legitimate targets for the use of violent force. Taking these claims as deeply problematic, we join a growing body of scholarship on the technopolitical logics that underpin an increasingly violent landscape of institutions, infrastructures, and actions, promising protection to some but arguably contributing to our collective insecurity. We examine the asymmetric distributions of sociotechnologies of (in)security; their deadly and injurious effects; and the legal, ethical, and moral questions that haunt their operations.
This paper draws on archival materials to read two demonstrations of FlatWorld, an immersive mili... more This paper draws on archival materials to read two demonstrations of FlatWorld, an immersive military training simulation developed between 2001 and 2007 at the University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies. The first demonstration is a video recording of a guided tour of the system, staged by its designers in 2005. The second is a documentary created by the US Public Broadcasting Service as part of their “embedded” media coverage of the system while it was installed at California’s Camp Pendleton in 2007. I critically attend to the imaginaries that are realized in the simulation’s figurations of places and (raced, gendered) bodies, as well as its storylines. This is part of a wider project of understanding how distinctions between the real and the virtual are effectively elided in technoscientific military discourses, in the interest of recognizing real/virtual entanglements while also reclaiming the differences that matter.
This essay sets out the motivating questions and initial analytic framing of research in progress... more This essay sets out the motivating questions and initial analytic framing of research in progress on the problem of ‘situational awareness’ within contemporary forms of (particularly U.S.) warfare. The focus more specifically is on the logics, cultural imaginaries and material practices of remotely-controlled weapon systems (particularly armed drones and weaponized robots). Drawing from reports in investigative journalism, military documents, and critical scholarship, I examine connections between the emphasis in military and security discourses on keeping ‘our’ bodies safe through so called network-centric warfare, and the project of cutting the networks that might bring our wars too close to home.
This article takes as a touchstone the concept of location as it has been articulated through ant... more This article takes as a touchstone the concept of location as it has been articulated through anthropology’s reflections on its history and positioning as a field, and in relation to shifting engagements with contemporary technoscientific, political, and ethical problems. A second touchstone is one specific anthropological relocation—that is, into worlds of professional technology design. With figures of location and design in play, I describe some perspicuous moments that proved both generative and problematic in my own experience of establishing terms of engagement between anthropology and design. Though design has been considered recently as a model for anthropology’s future, I argue instead that it is best positioned as a problematic object for an anthropology of the contemporary. In writing about design’s limits, my argument is that, like anthropology, design needs to acknowledge the specificities of its place, to locate itself as one (albeit multiple) figure and practice of transformation.
Written as the introduction to a special issue of Body & Society on the topic of animation and au... more Written as the introduction to a special issue of Body & Society on the topic of animation and automation, this article considers the interrelation of those two terms through readings of relevant work in film studies and science and technology studies (STS), inflected through recent scholarship on the body. Drawing upon historical and contemporary examples, we trace how movement is
This article explores the resonating figures of primate, child, and robot in contemporary technos... more This article explores the resonating figures of primate, child, and robot in contemporary technoscientific corporealizations of the ‘almost human’. We take as our model (in)organism ‘Lucy the Robot Orangutan’, roboticist Steve Grand’s project to create an artificial life form with a mind of its own. One aspect of Lucy’s figuration by Grand, we argue, which ties her to Haraway’s analysis of the primate, is of the robot as a model for animal, and more specifically (or aspirationally) human, cognition. We follow the trope of ‘model organism’ as it is under discussion within science and technology studies and as an ironic descriptor for our own interest in Lucy as an entity/project through which to illuminate figurations within robotics more widely. Primate and robot together are forms of natureculture that help to clarify how the categories of animal and machine are entangled, while making explicit investments in their differences from one another, and from the third category of the human. We conclude, again following Haraway, by imagining what other possibilities there might be for figuring humans, robots, and their relations if we escape the reiterative imaginary of the robot as proxy for becoming human.
The focus of my inquiry in this article is the figure of the Human that is enacted in the design ... more The focus of my inquiry in this article is the figure of the Human that is enacted in the design of the humanoid robot. The humanoid or anthropomorphic robot is a model (in)organism, engineered in the roboticist's laboratory in ways that both align with and diverge from the model organisms of biology. Like other model organisms, the laboratory robot's life is inextricably infused with its inherited materialities and with the ongoing-or truncated-labours of its affiliated humans. But while animal models are rendered progressively more standardised and replicable as tools for the biological sciences, the humanoid robot is individuated and naturalised. Three stagings of humanrobot encounters (with the robots Mertz, Kismet and Robota respectively) demonstrate different possibilities for conceptualising these subject objects, for the claims about humanness that they corporealise, and for the kinds of witnessing that they presuppose.
Abstract. Through the case of a particular organization devoted to technological research and dev... more Abstract. Through the case of a particular organization devoted to technological research and development, this paper investigates how values of the 'new' operate in what Appadurai (1986) has characterized as the social life of objects. Drawing on previous scholarship in ...
Technology Analysis & Strategic Management, 2000
Based on research experience within US corporations, this paper examines the rhetoric and practic... more Based on research experience within US corporations, this paper examines the rhetoric and practices of organizational and technological 'innovation'. Our aim is to identify discourses of innovation as a site for critical studies. Two cases are used to illustrate ways in which initiatives launched in the name of change are based in traditional cultural frames that work in practice to conserve existing institutional orders. We close with some observations on alternative, indigenous sources of innovation and the conditions required to sustain them.
Within the past 10 years, some new dialogues (or more accurately, multilogues) have opened up amo... more Within the past 10 years, some new dialogues (or more accurately, multilogues) have opened up among researchers in psychology, anthropology, sociology, linguistics, philosophy, and computer science. Some of those who have participated in these ...
The critique presented in Suchman (1994a) was motivated by two central premises of CSCW research.... more The critique presented in Suchman (1994a) was motivated by two central premises of CSCW research. First, that designers of CSCW systems are designers of organizational life, through the systems that they build. 1 Second, that CSCW technologies require the ...
Journal of the American Statistical Association, 1990
Interactional Troubles In Face-to-Face Survey Interviews LUCY SUCHMAN and BRIGITTE JORDAN' 1... more Interactional Troubles In Face-to-Face Survey Interviews LUCY SUCHMAN and BRIGITTE JORDAN' 1. INTERVIEWS AS INTERACTION For statistically based social science, survey research is the principal means of obtaining data about the social world. The interview from this ...
Experimenting with Ethnography: A companion to analysis, 2021
Experimenting with Ethnography collects twenty-one essays that open new paths for doing ethnograp... more Experimenting with Ethnography collects twenty-one essays that open new paths for doing ethnographic analysis. The contributors—who come from a variety of intellectual and methodological traditions—enliven analysis by refusing to take it as an abstract, disembodied exercise. Rather, they frame it as a concrete mode of action and a creative practice. Encompassing topics ranging from language and the body to technology and modes of collaboration, the essays invite readers to focus on the imaginative work that needs to be performed prior to completing an argument. Whether exchanging objects, showing how to use drawn images as a way to analyze data, or working with smartphones, sound recordings, and social media as analytic devices, the contributors explore the deliberate processes for pursuing experimental thinking through ethnography. Practical and broad in theoretical scope, Experimenting with Ethnography is an indispensable companion for all ethnographers.
Border Thinking About Anthropologies/Designs, 2021
Since 1970 the School for Advanced Research (formerly the School of American Research) and SAR Pr... more Since 1970 the School for Advanced Research (formerly the School of American Research) and SAR Press have published over one hundred volumes in the Advanced Seminar series. These volumes arise from seminars held on SAR's Santa Fe campus that bring together small groups of experts to explore a single issue. Participants assess recent innovations in theory and methods, appraise ongoing research, and share data relevant to problems of significance in anthropology and related disciplines. The resulting volumes reflect SAR's commitment to the development of new ideas and to scholarship of the highest caliber. The complete Advanced Seminar series can be found at www.sarweb.org.
Sensing In/Security: Sensors as transnational security infrastructures, 2020
This is the pre-print of the Foreword to the collection Sensing In/Security: Sensors as transnati... more This is the pre-print of the Foreword to the collection Sensing In/Security: Sensors as transnational security infrastructures, edited by Nina Klimburg-Witjes, Nikolaus Poechhacker, and Geoffrey Bowker, forthcoming from Mattering Press.
Preface to the Russian Translation of Human-Machine Reconfigurations
Translated by Alisa Maximov... more Preface to the Russian Translation of Human-Machine Reconfigurations
Translated by Alisa Maximova
Edited by Andrei Korbut
With an introduction to Russian edition by Lucy Suchman
ISBN ISBN: 978-5-9500244-5-0
Cyborg Futures: Cross-disciplinary Perspectives on Artificial Intelligence and Robotics. Theresa Heffernan (ed.) Palgrave, 2019
Contemporary discussions in the popular media of developments in the creation of humanoid robots,... more Contemporary discussions in the popular media of developments in the creation of humanoid robots, reinforced by concerned roboticists, begin with the question: Given the ‘rise’ of these humanlike machines, how should we humans respond? This chapter argues that our first response should be to question the question, to recognize the rhetorical sleight of hand that underwrites this seeming invitation to concern and action. The question implies acceptance of the proposition that these technologies are advancing towards humanness, and that this advance is inevitable. The inevitability is based on the premise that development of the field of robotics is a kind of natural/cultural occurrence, like global warming. The implication is that, like climate change, however much the expansion of robotics may be induced by human activity, it is now proceeding with its own dynamic.
But AI and robotics are very different kinds of natureculture than global warming. True, dynamics are in place that will unfold if they are not actively interrupted and mitigated. But these dynamics are much more wholly human ones, less entangled with the more-than-human and more amenable to a political will to intervention. Moreover, while technological initiatives are progressing in some areas (processing power, data storage, the sophistication of algorithms, and networking), there is a notable lack of progress in efforts to achieve humanlike capacities. These differences are obscured, however, by the prevailing mystification of the state of the robotic arts and sciences. So what if the questions that we ask are rather these: In what ways, and to what extent, are machines becoming more humanlike, and in relation to what figure of the human? In whose interests are these projects, and who decides that they should go forward, in lieu of other projects of transformative future making?
We can begin to address these questions by looking more closely at the boundaries of robot agencies: that is, the ways in which they are currently designated, and how they might be drawn differently. This approach begins from the observation that the framing of so-called autonomous robots – in both their visual and narrative representation, and in the material practices of their demonstration – reiterates a commitment to the figure of a human subject characterized by bounded individuality, and to the reproduction of an order of hierarchical humanity deeply rooted in imperial/colonial histories.
The reading of humanoid robot mediations that follows is part of a broader critical engagement with projects to configure robots in the image of living creatures, and in particular humans and their companion species. Tracking and responding to media reports of these developments, I try to identify alternative resources from anthropology, science and technology studies, feminist and post/decolonial scholarship that can help us to question the assumptions that these stories repeat, at the same time that they purport to be telling us about things that are unprecedented and, most disturbingly, sure to happen. My aim is to destabilize the authority, the credibility, of these narratives of humanoid (and more broadly lifelike) robots, in order to hold open a space for critical analysis that might enable, in turn, very different technological projects.
Methods for studying science and technology, like their research objects, are both already made a... more Methods for studying science and technology, like their research objects, are both already made and always in the making. With respect to technology studies in particular, we have by now a powerful toolkit of conceptual and practical resources to bring to the analysis of objects, ranging from individual artefacts to socio-technical systems, historically and in contemporary formations. To name just two examples among many, Haraway's 'cyborg' alerts us to the history of nationalist and military technoscience as a crucible for contemporary conjoinings of bodies and machines, while also opening up generative resources with which to investigate particular cases in ways that retheorize the nature of human-non-human entanglement (Haraway, 1985/1991). Law's trope of 'heterogeneous engineering' both expands and further specifies how scale is enacted in and through complex socio-technical assemblages, as they draw together and multiply entities through time and across space (Law, 1987). Offered as an addition to this toolkit, the device of configuration has two broad uses. First, as an aid to delineating the composition and bounds of an object of analysis, in part through the acknowledgement that doing so is integral not only to the study of technologies, but to their very existence as objects. And second, in drawing our analytic attention to the ways in which technologies materialize cultural imaginaries, just as imaginaries narrate the significance of technical artefacts. Configuration in this sense is a device for studying technologies with particular attention to the imaginaries and materialities that they join together, an orientation that resonates as well with the term's common usage to refer to the conjoining of diverse elements in practices of systems design and engineering. In what follows, I attempt to elaborate the sense of configuration as a tool to think with about the work of drawing the boundaries that reflexively delineate technological objects, and as a conceptual frame for recovering the heterogeneous relations that technologies fold together. I offer two case studies of socio-technical projects that, while not done through the trope of configuration, can be read as demonstrations of the sensibilities that it recommends.
We are responsible for the world of which we are a part, not because it is an arbitrary construct... more We are responsible for the world of which we are a part, not because it is an arbitrary construction of our choosing but because reality is sedimented out of particular practices that we have a role in shaping and through which we are shaped.
Briefing paper prepared for the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) Informal Meeting... more Briefing paper prepared for the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) Informal Meeting of Experts on Lethal Autonomous Weapons, Geneva, 12 April 2016.
As a contribution to the CCW's third informal meeting of experts on lethal autonomous weapon systems (LAWS), this briefing paper focuses on the implications of the requirement of situational awareness for autonomous action – whether by humans, machines or complex human-machine systems. For the purposes of this paper, 'autonomy' refers to self-directed action, and more specifically the action-according-to-rule that comprises military discipline. Unlike the algorithmic sense of a rule as that term is used in Artificial Intelligence (AI), military rules always require interpretation in relation to a specific situation, or situational awareness. Focusing on the principle of distinction, I argue that International Humanitarian Law (IHL) presupposes capacities of situational awareness that it does not, and cannot, fully specify. At the same time, autonomy or 'self-direction' in the case of machines requires the adequate specification (by human designers) of the conditions under which associated actions should be taken. This requirement for unambiguous specification of condition/action rules marks a crucial difference between autonomy as a legally accountable human capacity, and machine autonomy. The requirement for situational awareness in the context of combat, as a prerequisite for action that adheres to IHL, raises serious doubts regarding the feasibility of lawful autonomy in weapon systems. The questions surrounding lethal autonomous weapon systems (LAWS) are being addressed by the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) along multiple lines of analysis. This briefing paper is meant as a contribution to discussions regarding the concept of autonomy, on the basis of which I present an argument questioning the feasibility of LAWS that would comply with International Humanitarian Law (IHL). 1 This argument is based not on principle, but rather on empirical evidence regarding the interpretive capacities that legal frameworks like IHL presuppose for their application in a specific situation. These capacities make up what in military terms is named situational awareness. 2 Despite other areas of
A conversation on design and innovation between the Future Archaeologist, the Anthropologist of T... more A conversation on design and innovation between the Future Archaeologist, the Anthropologist of Technoscience and the Collective Designer.
Understanding Practice: Perspectives on Activity in Context, 1993
The goal of research in artificial intelligence (AI) is to design runnable computer programs that... more The goal of research in artificial intelligence (AI) is to design runnable computer programs that replicate some aspect of human behavior. A common first step in the design process is to represent in some form the behavior to be replicated. In this paper we consider representational practice in AI as the practical activity of two researchers working together at a whiteboard (i.e. a white 'blackboard' used with colored markers.) In locating the science there, we aim to bring into focus its character as socially organized craftsmanship – the crafting together of a complex machinery made of heterogeneous materials, mobilized in the service of developing a theory of mind. In this effort we align ourselves with recent developments in the investigation and respecification of science as practice, beginning with Garfinkel's recommendations (1967) that we take sociology's subject matter to be the identifying details of particular forms of practical action, and Lave's analyses (1988) of the social and material structuring of specifically situated activity systems. Prior ethnomethodological studies of science orient us as well to the centrality of repesentational devices in the structuring of science practice (see for example Garfinkel et al 1981, Lynch 1985, Lynch et al 1983, Livingston 1986, Lynch and Woolgar 1988), as does Latour's notion of inscription devices (1986). Finally, we take inspiration from Latour's discussion (1986) of science as craftwork and Law's view (1987) of technological development as heterogenous engineering.
Constituting shared workspaces Lucy Suchman This chapter takes up the problem of relations betwee... more Constituting shared workspaces Lucy Suchman This chapter takes up the problem of relations between lived work practices and the material environments they inhabit, animate, provide for the significance of, and rely upon (see also Goodwin & Goodwin, this volume). More ...
... General Terms: Experimentation, Human Factors. Collaborative Colleagues: Jeanne C. Finley: co... more ... General Terms: Experimentation, Human Factors. Collaborative Colleagues: Jeanne C. Finley: colleagues. John Muse: colleagues. Lucy Suchman: colleagues. Jeannette Blomberg: colleagues. Susan Newman: colleagues. Randy Trigg: colleagues. ...
Based on a paper presented at the Annual Meetings of the American Anthropological Association, 1 ... more Based on a paper presented at the Annual Meetings of the American Anthropological Association, 1 December 2017, Washington, D.C.; forthcoming in Humanism: The Second Annual Debate of Anthropological Keywords, edited by Carole McGranahan, press tbd.
Proceedings of the IFIP TC13 Interantional …, 1997
This address offers a reflection on the aptness of the metaphor of interactive technologies, in l... more This address offers a reflection on the aptness of the metaphor of interactive technologies, in light cr developments over the past ten years. It argues for a shift f;om the [oeus on interaction narrowly defmed, to a project of integration of artifacts into work environments and workmg practices.
This talk considers how capacities for action are currently figured at the human-machine interfac... more This talk considers how capacities for action are currently figured at the human-machine interface, and how they might be imaginatively and materially reconfigured. Drawing on recent scholarship in feminist science and technology studies, I argue for research aimed at tracing differences within specific sociomaterial arrangements, without resorting to essentialist divides. This requires expanding our unit of analysis, while recognizing the
This is the text of a discussion presented in the session 'Proliferation, dispersal and (in)secur... more This is the text of a discussion presented in the session 'Proliferation, dispersal and (in)security: towards new vocabularies for the debate between STS and critical security studies,' organised by Annalisa Pelizza and Claudia Aradau. The session 'Dispersal at the Border' was held on 18 August as part of the 2020 joint annual meetings of the European Association for Studies of Science and Technology (EASST) and the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S). My thanks to Annalisa and Claudia for the invitation to participate in this panel.
Paper presented in the session ‘Mere Innovation: Postcolonial and other ruminations on invention ... more Paper presented in the session ‘Mere Innovation: Postcolonial and other ruminations on invention and imitation’, organized by Cori Hayden and Lucy Suchman, 4S/EASST, Rotterdam, 23 August 2008.
DASTS er en faglig forening for STS i Danmark med det formål at stimulere kvaliteten, bredden og ... more DASTS er en faglig forening for STS i Danmark med det formål at stimulere kvaliteten, bredden og samarbejdet inden for dansk STS-forskning samt at markere dansk STS tydeligere i nationale og inter-nationale sammenhaenge. This special issue is a follow up on a PhD course entitled "Framing Screens: Knowledge, Interaction and Practice" held at the IT Univer-sity of Copenhagen in the fall of 2010. Course participants from a variety of disciplines and countries joined the senior faculty who served as midwives for the births of new understandings and con-ceptualizations of screens.
DASTS er en faglig forening for STS i Danmark med det formål at stimulere kvaliteten, bredden og ... more DASTS er en faglig forening for STS i Danmark med det formål at stimulere kvaliteten, bredden og samarbejdet inden for dansk STS-forskning samt at markere dansk STS tydeligere i nationale og inter-nationale sammenhaenge. This special issue is a follow up on a PhD course entitled "Framing Screens: Knowledge, Interaction and Practice" held at the IT Univer-sity of Copenhagen in the fall of 2010. Course participants from a variety of disciplines and countries joined the senior faculty who served as midwives for the births of new understandings and con-ceptualizations of screens.
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Book by Lucy Suchman
Neural Networks proposes to reconstruct situated practices, social histories, mediating techniques, and ontological assumptions that inform the computational project of the same name. If so-called machine learning comprises a statistical approach to pattern extraction, then neural networks can be defined as a biologically inspired model that relies on probabilistically weighted neuron-like units to identify such patterns. Far from signaling the ultimate convergence of human and machine intelligence, however, neural networks highlight the technologization of neurophysiology that characterizes virtually all strands of neuroscientific and AI research of the past century. Taking this traffic as its starting point, this volume explores how cognition came to be constructed as essentially computational in nature, to the point of underwriting a technologized view of human biology, psychology, and sociability, and how countermovements provide resources for thinking otherwise.
Papers by Lucy Suchman
Starting with her early works on “Talk with Machines” (1986, republished in 2021) and her books Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication (1987) and Human-Machine Reconfigurations (2007a), Lucy Suchman not only opened up a new domain of scientific interest in humans and technology, but also showed how the scope of human machine relations needs to be reconceptualized. With her most recent works (2023a, 2023b), she not only widens the perspective on the contexts for machine usage, particularly by the military, but she also gives insights on how to conceptualize AI in terms of its ontological status and its agency. Discussing the relevance of the concept of autonomy for relations between humans and machines, Lucy Suchman clearly positions herself in the debate and demonstrates how we need to reconfigure and address so-called machine autonomy.
This article aims to integrate two interrelated strands in critical security studies. The first is mounting evidence for the fallacy of claims for precision and accuracy in the United States ‘counterterrorism’ programme, particularly as it involves expanding aerial surveillance in support of operations of extrajudicial assassination. The second line of critical analysis concerns growing investment in the further automation of these operations, more specifically in the form of the US Department of Defense Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team, or Project Maven. Building upon generative intersections of critical security studies and science and technology studies (STS), I argue that the promotion of automated data analysis under the sign of artificial intelligence can only serve to exacerbate military operations that are at once discriminatory and indiscriminate in their targeting, while remaining politically and legally unaccountable.
Neural Networks proposes to reconstruct situated practices, social histories, mediating techniques, and ontological assumptions that inform the computational project of the same name. If so-called machine learning comprises a statistical approach to pattern extraction, then neural networks can be defined as a biologically inspired model that relies on probabilistically weighted neuron-like units to identify such patterns. Far from signaling the ultimate convergence of human and machine intelligence, however, neural networks highlight the technologization of neurophysiology that characterizes virtually all strands of neuroscientific and AI research of the past century. Taking this traffic as its starting point, this volume explores how cognition came to be constructed as essentially computational in nature, to the point of underwriting a technologized view of human biology, psychology, and sociability, and how countermovements provide resources for thinking otherwise.
Starting with her early works on “Talk with Machines” (1986, republished in 2021) and her books Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication (1987) and Human-Machine Reconfigurations (2007a), Lucy Suchman not only opened up a new domain of scientific interest in humans and technology, but also showed how the scope of human machine relations needs to be reconceptualized. With her most recent works (2023a, 2023b), she not only widens the perspective on the contexts for machine usage, particularly by the military, but she also gives insights on how to conceptualize AI in terms of its ontological status and its agency. Discussing the relevance of the concept of autonomy for relations between humans and machines, Lucy Suchman clearly positions herself in the debate and demonstrates how we need to reconfigure and address so-called machine autonomy.
This article aims to integrate two interrelated strands in critical security studies. The first is mounting evidence for the fallacy of claims for precision and accuracy in the United States ‘counterterrorism’ programme, particularly as it involves expanding aerial surveillance in support of operations of extrajudicial assassination. The second line of critical analysis concerns growing investment in the further automation of these operations, more specifically in the form of the US Department of Defense Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team, or Project Maven. Building upon generative intersections of critical security studies and science and technology studies (STS), I argue that the promotion of automated data analysis under the sign of artificial intelligence can only serve to exacerbate military operations that are at once discriminatory and indiscriminate in their targeting, while remaining politically and legally unaccountable.
Translated by Alisa Maximova
Edited by Andrei Korbut
With an introduction to Russian edition by Lucy Suchman
ISBN ISBN: 978-5-9500244-5-0
But AI and robotics are very different kinds of natureculture than global warming. True, dynamics are in place that will unfold if they are not actively interrupted and mitigated. But these dynamics are much more wholly human ones, less entangled with the more-than-human and more amenable to a political will to intervention. Moreover, while technological initiatives are progressing in some areas (processing power, data storage, the sophistication of algorithms, and networking), there is a notable lack of progress in efforts to achieve humanlike capacities. These differences are obscured, however, by the prevailing mystification of the state of the robotic arts and sciences. So what if the questions that we ask are rather these: In what ways, and to what extent, are machines becoming more humanlike, and in relation to what figure of the human? In whose interests are these projects, and who decides that they should go forward, in lieu of other projects of transformative future making?
We can begin to address these questions by looking more closely at the boundaries of robot agencies: that is, the ways in which they are currently designated, and how they might be drawn differently. This approach begins from the observation that the framing of so-called autonomous robots – in both their visual and narrative representation, and in the material practices of their demonstration – reiterates a commitment to the figure of a human subject characterized by bounded individuality, and to the reproduction of an order of hierarchical humanity deeply rooted in imperial/colonial histories.
The reading of humanoid robot mediations that follows is part of a broader critical engagement with projects to configure robots in the image of living creatures, and in particular humans and their companion species. Tracking and responding to media reports of these developments, I try to identify alternative resources from anthropology, science and technology studies, feminist and post/decolonial scholarship that can help us to question the assumptions that these stories repeat, at the same time that they purport to be telling us about things that are unprecedented and, most disturbingly, sure to happen. My aim is to destabilize the authority, the credibility, of these narratives of humanoid (and more broadly lifelike) robots, in order to hold open a space for critical analysis that might enable, in turn, very different technological projects.
As a contribution to the CCW's third informal meeting of experts on lethal autonomous weapon systems (LAWS), this briefing paper focuses on the implications of the requirement of situational awareness for autonomous action – whether by humans, machines or complex human-machine systems. For the purposes of this paper, 'autonomy' refers to self-directed action, and more specifically the action-according-to-rule that comprises military discipline. Unlike the algorithmic sense of a rule as that term is used in Artificial Intelligence (AI), military rules always require interpretation in relation to a specific situation, or situational awareness. Focusing on the principle of distinction, I argue that International Humanitarian Law (IHL) presupposes capacities of situational awareness that it does not, and cannot, fully specify. At the same time, autonomy or 'self-direction' in the case of machines requires the adequate specification (by human designers) of the conditions under which associated actions should be taken. This requirement for unambiguous specification of condition/action rules marks a crucial difference between autonomy as a legally accountable human capacity, and machine autonomy. The requirement for situational awareness in the context of combat, as a prerequisite for action that adheres to IHL, raises serious doubts regarding the feasibility of lawful autonomy in weapon systems. The questions surrounding lethal autonomous weapon systems (LAWS) are being addressed by the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) along multiple lines of analysis. This briefing paper is meant as a contribution to discussions regarding the concept of autonomy, on the basis of which I present an argument questioning the feasibility of LAWS that would comply with International Humanitarian Law (IHL). 1 This argument is based not on principle, but rather on empirical evidence regarding the interpretive capacities that legal frameworks like IHL presuppose for their application in a specific situation. These capacities make up what in military terms is named situational awareness. 2 Despite other areas of