"Refusing to see minds as embodied, culturally-situated, or inter-related, they also gave up on minds as having motives, desires or beliefs, or at least on the idea that anything could be known about them. It could be argued that they gave up on minds altogether in order to focus on prediction, optimisation and control.
[...]
The equivalent positions of human and computer, the insistence on disembodied ‘outputs’ and the comparative nature of the judgement are all used as signs of the test’s objectivity. But if we look deeper, it is a maelstrom of power play and cultural assumptions."
As other commenters have pointed out, linking 'passing' with the Turing test to gender is really insightful. I also love the way, in the bits I've pulled out above the way that you've shown how reliant disembodied GenAI is on embodied congnition.
Great stuff. I hope you're working on a book version of your essays, at the very least!
Thank you Doug, I have tried to bring bodies back into view in my writing - especially the bodies of decision-makers and data workers that are otherwise disappeared. I'm aware that in the case of gender and race particularly, we can't just point to bodies as though they have their own immutable logic that trumps the logic of computation. There are plenty of binary opposites and immutable categories being asserted over in that direction too. Bodies are also always 'passing as'. I hope I've stepped carefully enough through this difficult terrain.
For me it's about how mind, thought, sentience emerge only in the context of forms of life. Having a form of life with others, to me, means having a vulnerable body that requires care from others to survive, and a co-creating body that can build and participate in a social world (a body of tools and signs). That's the bare ontology of the body for me - it doesn't involve any essential categories or, as David Graeber would say, any particular form of life. So I tend towards the cultural and historical rather than the biological or anthropological in my thinking about body/minds.
Thank you Helen for this insightful essay. I'm currently reading 'Julia' a companion novel to Orwell's 1984 which, with it's mechanical fiction machines and ministry of truth eerily (and very much 'of its time'), come together reflect some of the challenges raised.
I increasing feel that we're moving from being 'Turing's Interrogators' to being the person inside the 'Mechanical Turk' feeding the AI machine rather than being able to question and challenge it.
"Refusing to see minds as embodied, culturally-situated, or inter-related, they also gave up on minds as having motives, desires or beliefs, or at least on the idea that anything could be known about them. It could be argued that they gave up on minds altogether in order to focus on prediction, optimisation and control.
[...]
The equivalent positions of human and computer, the insistence on disembodied ‘outputs’ and the comparative nature of the judgement are all used as signs of the test’s objectivity. But if we look deeper, it is a maelstrom of power play and cultural assumptions."
As other commenters have pointed out, linking 'passing' with the Turing test to gender is really insightful. I also love the way, in the bits I've pulled out above the way that you've shown how reliant disembodied GenAI is on embodied congnition.
Great stuff. I hope you're working on a book version of your essays, at the very least!
Thank you Doug, I have tried to bring bodies back into view in my writing - especially the bodies of decision-makers and data workers that are otherwise disappeared. I'm aware that in the case of gender and race particularly, we can't just point to bodies as though they have their own immutable logic that trumps the logic of computation. There are plenty of binary opposites and immutable categories being asserted over in that direction too. Bodies are also always 'passing as'. I hope I've stepped carefully enough through this difficult terrain.
For me it's about how mind, thought, sentience emerge only in the context of forms of life. Having a form of life with others, to me, means having a vulnerable body that requires care from others to survive, and a co-creating body that can build and participate in a social world (a body of tools and signs). That's the bare ontology of the body for me - it doesn't involve any essential categories or, as David Graeber would say, any particular form of life. So I tend towards the cultural and historical rather than the biological or anthropological in my thinking about body/minds.
Thank you. You have given us a lot to ponder in this essay. The gender aspect is one I hadn't considered in this regard.
Thank you Helen for this insightful essay. I'm currently reading 'Julia' a companion novel to Orwell's 1984 which, with it's mechanical fiction machines and ministry of truth eerily (and very much 'of its time'), come together reflect some of the challenges raised.
I increasing feel that we're moving from being 'Turing's Interrogators' to being the person inside the 'Mechanical Turk' feeding the AI machine rather than being able to question and challenge it.