Human-machine Reconfigurations

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 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.

ISBN 052167588X   Volumes 1 ISBN13 9780521675888 (What's this?)   Weight (grammes) 440 Publisher Cambridge University Press   Published in Cambridge Imprint Cambridge University Press   Series title Learning in Doing: Social, Cognitive and Computational Perspectives Format Paperback   Previous ISBN 9780521337397 Publication date 04 Dec 2006   Height (mm) 228 Library of Congress 2006007793   Width (mm) 152 DEWEY 006.3   Spine width (mm) 17 DEWEY edition DC22   Academic level Professional / Scholarly Pages 328

1		Readings and responses		8
2		Preface to the 1st edition		24
3		Introduction to the 1st edition		29
4		Interactive artifacts		33
5		Plans		51
6		Situated actions		69
7		Communicative resources		85
8		Case and methods		109
9		Human-machine communication		125
10		Conclusion to the 1st edition		176
11		Plans, scripts, and other ordering devices		187
12		Agencies at the interface		206
13		Figuring the human in AI and robotics		226
14		Demystifications and reenchantments of the humanlike machine		241
15		Reconfigurations		259

'... a wide ranging and ambitious book,and makes an important contribution to studies of technology, action and agency. ... the text remains readable and informative and makes a valuable and important intervention in the field.' British Journal of Sociology

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