Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions

by Lucy Suchman

• ISBN13: 9780521675888
• ISBN10: 052167588X
• Edition: 2nd
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-12-04
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This book considers how agencies are currently figured at the human-machine interface, and how they might be imaginatively and materially reconfigured. Contrary to the apparent enlivening of objects promised by the sciences of the artificial, the author proposes that the rhetorics and practices of those sciences work to obscure the performative nature of both persons and things. The question then shifts from debates over the status of human-like machines, to that of how humans and machines are enacted as similar or different in practice, and with what theoretical, practical and political consequences. Drawing on recent scholarship across the social sciences, humanities and computing, the author argues for research aimed at tracing the differences within specific sociomaterial arrangements without resorting to essentialist divides. This requires expanding our unit of analysis, while recognizing the inevitable cuts or boundaries through which technological systems are constituted.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Preface to 1st edition

Introduction

1. Readings and responses

2. Preface to the 1st edition

3. Introduction to the 1st edition

4.Interactive artifacts

5. Plans

6. Situated actions

7. Communicative resources

8. Case and methods

9. Human-machine communication

10. Conclusion to the 1st edition

11. Plans, scripts and other ordering devices

12. Agencies at the interface

13. Figuring the human in AI and robotics

14. Demystifications and re-enchantments of the human-lke maching

15 Reconfigurations

Notes

References.