Refactoring Agency
-
Upload
mike-travers -
Category
Technology
-
view
490 -
download
0
description
Transcript of Refactoring Agency
Why Vitalism Won’t Die; orRefactoring Agency
Mike [email protected]
http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com
Refactor Camp 2012
Trained in the mechanist/reductionist tradition
• The world consists of physical objects and forces
• This is theoretically enough to explain everything
• Success story: molecular biology• Not-so-successful story: AI
Vitalism / Animism
• Mechanism violates people’s commonsense intuitions (eg free will)
• Not going to get into this tired debate
• Old, more or less discredited theories of “life force”
My nagging itch
• Despite its unscientificness,• There’s something in vitalist and
similar theories that we need to pay attention to.
How to be a vitalist at MIT
• I cheated -- with the epistemological / metaphorical turn
• How do people understand the world, and computers, and systems?
• Through a wide variety of metaphors including – Animate Metaphors– Agents– Programming by creating networks of
agents
Distributed Agency
• Minsky’s Society of Mind• EO Wilson’s Ant Colonies• Hewitt’s Actor Model of Computation• Agre & Chapman’s Situated Action
Vivarium Project(Apple and MIT)
Other neo-vitalists
• Christopher Alexanderfrom Pattern Language to a radical metaphysics of the living
• Bruno Latour and followersA democracy of objects
Refactoring Agency
‘In the case of ... potato chips, it seems appropriate to regard the hand’s actions as only quasi- or semi-intentional, for the chips themselves seem to call forth, or provoke and stoke, the manual labor…To eat chips is to enter into an assemblage in which the I is not necessarily the most decisive operator” -- Bennett, Vibrant Matter
Refactoring the grammar of agency
I ate the potato chips.
The potato chips ??? me.eta
Agent
Patient
I ate the potato chips.
The potato chips were eaten by me.
The potato chips compelled me to eat them.
So what?
• We are increasingly embedded in complex networks of sociotechnology
• How do we make sense of it?• We need to be able to analyze systems
through simultaneous application of a variety of cognitive systems:– Mechanical– Tool– Agency
• Software has goals of its own, whether we acknowledge it or not
End