Re: Tucson reports

Mike Cole (mcole who-is-at weber.ucsd.edu)
Sun, 2 Nov 1997 15:32:02 -0800 (PST)

I strongly, positively, resonate to the following position summariszed
by Jay in his note on 4s. It reinforced my sense that a symposium on
AT/ANT is ak priority for MCA and members of this list. Reijo is
presumably sending a paper on this topic soon, but how about a symposium?
Jay? Any takers?
mike

Lucy Suchman, whose work has been in the field of Artificial Intelligence,
raised a number of troubling and exciting questions about the moral,
ethical, and political implications of various views of Agency. She seems
to developed a position that artefacts, including intelligent machines, do
not have agency except as part of activity networks that include agentive
humans, and that human agency is fundamental to the derived, or apparent
agency of nonhuman actors. She argued that it is morally and politically
unwise to try to define agency in such a way that humans and nonhumans
(machines, tools, artefacts) have the same kind of agency.