Re-conceptualizing domains in neuroscience, hopes and utopias aside

Turner, Jessica A.; Turner, Matthew D.

doi:10.1038/s41593-021-00946-x

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…Focusing on the discursive dimension of the US tech industry, Fred Turner (2006) famously considered the intertwining of ‘New Communalism’ with engineering culture in Silicon Valley: where utopianism originally met technical solutionism. Yet, whilst the engineer’s ethics of ‘does it work?’ (Turner, 2017: n.p.) serves the interests of other AI researchers within a self-contained framework (‘narrow’), now corporate tech presents technically ‘narrow’ frameworks to legitimise managerial business policy (‘cynical’) (Levy, 2020).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 96%

“…In recent years, the disturbance of this narrow logic has left engineers at big tech firms confused when confronted with the perceived harm caused by otherwise ‘elegantly’ built systems (Turner, 2017). However, our interest in this narrowness is not to judge the moral character of technical practitioners, but to engage with this ‘gap’ that causes irritation.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Cynical technical practice: From AI to APIs

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2022

Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Med

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In this article, we examine how critical thinking, methods and design are used within the tech industry, using Philip Agre’s notion of critical technical practice (CTP) to consider the rise of ‘cynical’ technical practice. Arguments by tech firms that their AI systems are ethical, contextual, situated or fair, as well as APIs that are privacy-compliant and offer greater user control, are now commonplace. Yet, these justifications routinely disguise the organisational, and economic, reasons for the development of technical systems and features. The article considers how different forms of ‘technical critique’ are used by technical practitioners such as software engineers, applying Agre’s work on CTP, AI planning, grammars of action and empowerment to evaluate, and contextualise these justifications. As Agre understood, technical practitioners are not necessarily ‘a-critical’ or ‘uncritical’ in their approach to the design of technological systems or methods, but ordinarily compare the utility or performance of such according to a golden ethic: ‘does it work?’. Drawing on Agre’s studies of AI in the 1990s, the article considers how and what Agre considered to be the ‘Cartesian soul’ of AI research, on linguistic structuralism, and continues to frame much work within the wider tech industry today. Yet increasingly, as the article shows, ‘narrow’ and cynical forms of technical criticality are being used to legitimise, and publicise, corporate strategies of tech firms, whether through the development of AI systems by automotive start-ups such as Comma, or the management of relations with external developers through APIs, in the case of Facebook. Rather than judging the moral character of technical practitioners, however, the article offers an approach – via the work of Philip Agre – to examine how critical thinking is used, and often abused, within and beyond the tech industry.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 96%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%