-
John Sutton (2006) Pre-publication draft of a review of
Stefano Franchi & Guven Guzeldere
(eds), Mechanical
Bodies, Computational Minds, forthcoming in
Philosophy in Review/
Comptes Rendus Philosophiques XXVI (4), December 2006
The published
version is forthcoming in Philosophy in Review/
Comptes Rendus Philosophiques XXVI (4), December 2006
This is a draft version only.
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Stefano Franchi and
Güven Güzeldere, eds. Mechanical
Bodies, Computational Minds: Artificial Intelligence from Automata to
Cyborgs.
Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2005. Pp. viii + 538. $95.00 (Cloth: ISBN 0-262-06243-7);
$45.00
(Paper: ISBN 0-262-56206-5).
The editors of this bulky volume tell us that an issue of
the Stanford Humanities Review ‘constituted
the seed of the project that culminated in this book’ (vii). They don’t
say
that it was the Spring 1995 issue of
that pioneering open-access e-journal, nor do they tell us how many or
which of
the 19 papers in this book derive from it. But since that issue is
still online
(as at August 28, 2006), at http://www.stanford.edu/group/SHR/4-2/text/toc.html,
any reader can see that 12 of its 15 papers have been reprinted almost
unaltered
here, a decade later, while in addition almost all of the editors’ 1995
introduction appears again in their expanded text.<>
Whatever the quality of these 12
papers, then, one is bound to wonder about the rationale for
reproducing them:
the editors give us no account, nor do they explain their choice of
additional
material. Never mind that we are not told why the editors have
reprinted
Dretske’s ‘Machines and the Mental’ from not 10 but 20 years ago: it is
an
important paper, after all, although the reader wouldn’t know from this
volume
that it has elicited a huge amount of commentary and attention since
1985, or
that it pre-dates Harnad’s 1990 similar arguments on ‘symbol
grounding’. More
worrying is that they don’t even tell us that
it is a reprint, or give any indication at all of its provenance.<>
The source of the reprinted 1997 Slate debate between
Dreyfus and Dennett
about Kasparov’s defeat by Deep Blue is acknowledged (though it too is
still
online, at http://www.slate.com/id/3650/).
But
the mishandling of Evelyn Fox Keller’s interesting paper will cause
more
confusion. It is titled ‘Marrying the Premodern to the Postmodern:
computers
and organisms after World War II’. This sounded familiar, as Fox Keller
has an
excellent paper of this title in a 2002 volume Prefiguring
Cyberculture: an intellectual history edited by Tofts,
Jonson, and Cavallero. No problem so far: that volume too is published
by MIT,
who (I assumed) must have some good reason for wanting to reprint it
here, and
indeed it would fit nicely with Andrew Pickering’s strong paper ‘A
Gallery of
Monsters: cybernetics and self-organization, 1940-1970’. But the paper
in the
current volume, it turns out, is not that
paper, and indeed is not on the topic of its title at all – there is
nothing
here about the postwar biology and cybernetics which is Fox Keller’s
topic
there. So what is the (mistitled) paper
in this book, which discusses cellular automata and Artificial Life?
More
detective work reveals it as the final chapter, ‘Synthetic Biology
Redux’, of Fox
Keller’s 2002 book Making Sense of Life,
reprinted without acknowledgement.<>
Of course delays and setbacks can
occur in the arduous process of getting a collection of essays together
for
publication, or republication; and errors can creep in to the most
careful
editors’ work. But it is disrespectful not to tell the reader
explicitly that most
of these papers are ten years old or more, or to explain the selection.
The
project would have been much better justified by a more thorough
culling of the
original journal issue, by inviting more additional contributors to
write new
pieces, and to ask the authors of those 1995 papers which do still
stand
critical scrutiny to add updates or commentaries on subsequent
developments.<>
The subtitle of the 1995 e-journal
issue - Artificial Intelligence and the
Humanities – gives a more accurate flavour of the editors’ intent
than the
current title. Their long joint contribution is a sprawling 134-page
chapter
which is the most substantial addition to the 1995 publication. It
bears the
same marks of hurry or inattention as the whole, with disconnections of
content, multiple repetitions of theme, and incoherent organization:
it’s
particularly regrettable that the chapter has not been radically edited
and
tightened, because there is an important thesis at its heart. Franchi
and Güzeldere
seek first to establish a distinction and then a dialogue between ‘AI’,
understood as a narrow research program established in the second half
of the
20th century, and the ‘broader intellectual project’ of
‘artificial
intelligence’ which spans the whole history of ‘human attempts to
create
intelligence’ (16); and then to suggest the use of this dialogue to
forge a
‘direct, close engagement between the sciences and the humanities’
(123). Amidst
a farrago of second-hand historical and philosophical anecdote, they
mount a
passionate defence of Philip Agre’s call to transform AI into an
‘interdisciplinary switchboard for the constructions of principled
characterizations of interaction between agents and their environment’
(78-9).
The dramatic shifts within the cognitive sciences over the last decade,
by which
cognition is increasingly seen as embodied, dynamical, situated, and
distributed, are briefly surveyed. But it is odd that despite their
rather
vague hopes for ‘the study of cyborgs’, the authors glance only in
passing at
Andy Clark’s significant post-connectionist efforts to realign the
cognitive sciences
from within; and bizarre that their positive invocations of
phenomenology’s
importance for cognitive science is backed by no more than the briefest
references to the work of Dupuy and Petitot, and none at all to that of
Shaun
Gallagher or Evan Thompson. Readers who are all in favour of specific,
telling,
better mutual interactions between AI and history (or anthropology, or
sociolinguistics, or developmental psychology, or media theory, or
sports science,
or cognitive archaeology …) will sadly not find anything precise here
(or in
the volume as a whole) to justify the bare claims that ‘the
professional AI
community … failed to comprehend the magnitude’ of their project, or
that this
project should be relocated ‘in a much broader intellectual framework’
(66-7).<>
Grumps aside, some of the 1995
papers are excellent. Philip Agre’s ‘The Soul Gained and Lost:
Artificial
Intelligence as a Philosophical Project’, Douglas Hofstadter’s ‘On
Seeing A’s and Seeing As’, and Harry Collins’
‘Humans, Machines, and the Structure of Knowledge’ can each serve as
fine
introductions to their authors’ bodies of work. Bruno Latour and
Genevieve
Teil’s ‘The Hume Machine: can association networks do more than formal
rules?’
is a remarkable and undernoticed intervention in the methodologies of
social
science. And Stephen Wilson’s ‘Artificial Intelligence Research as Art’
describes some of Wilson’s interactive artworks of the 1980s and early
1990s
along with some sane reflections on the aesthetics of what’s since
become known
as android science, and could well serve to structure a course on AI
and art along
with related MIT books such as The Robot
in the Garden (ed Goldberg), Mitchell Whitelaw’s Metacreation,
and Wilson’s own Information
Arts (2001). But barring Dretske, Fox Keller, and Pickering, the
other
contributions, both old and slightly less old, are disappointing. The
readers
most let down by this are those who would advocate the relevance of the
crucial
fields in question – feminist philosophy, literary theory, philosophy
of
language, pragmatist social theory, phenomenology, theology, and
philosophy of
technology – of which these are not worthy exemplars. Any effect of
this volume
as a whole may then be counter-productive, ceding ground to a narrower,
universalizing classical computationalism which rejects theories in
philosophy,
the humanities, and the social sciences as ‘too incomplete and too
vaguely
stated’ (Winston and Brady, quoted by Franchi and Güzeldere, 67).
This would be
sad at a time when there really are enough clues around in the
interdisciplinary mix to signal interactive, productive dialogues and
collaborations between research on robotics and affect, neurobiology
and
narrative, connectionism and culture, or memory and social ontology.
<>
John Sutton, Macquarie
University
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Updated 22 October 2006.