the vicarious experience of machine subjectivity
Sherry Turkle’s The Second Self(1984) is about the relationships early personal computer users had with their machines, and how this reciprocally reshaped “what it means to be human.” Whereas once humans defined themselves in relation to animals (which are incapable of rational thought and given over to sensation), now they are beginning to define themselves in relation to machines (which are incapable of feeling). “Where once we were rational animals, now we are feeling computers, emotional machines,” she suggests.
Turkle is writing about computers that are unnetworked here, so she sees using them as a kind of escape from interpersonal interaction, whereas now computers primarily mediate human interaction in all sorts of ways. So she tends to assume that computer use is a form of safe isolation that simulates interacting with a living being while protecting a person from the uncertainties of that: “Terrified of being alone, yet afraid of intimacy, we experience widespread feelings of emptiness, of disconnection, of the unreality of self. And here the computer, a companion without emotional demands, offers a compromise. You can be a loner, but never alone. You can interact, but need never feel vulnerable to another person.”
That same analysis has carried through to Turkle’s more recent work, which can make it feel out of touch. The “computer” in the form of an internet-connected phone can allow for all sorts of vulnerability and intimacy, and it opens one to all sorts of new emotional demands. People may feel compelled to always be available to others, always be “present” even when they are geographically distant. You can never be alone in a new and different sense.
That said, I found Turkle’s comparison of then-emerging AI theory with psychoanalysis pretty interesting.
The question here is not which theory, the psychoanalytic or the computational, is true, but rather how these very different ways of thinking about ourselves capture our imagination. Behind the popular acceptance of the Freudian theory was a nervous, often guilty reoccupation with the self as sexual; behind the widespread interest in computational interpretations is an equally nervous preoccupation with the self as a machine. Playing with psychoanalytic and computational theories allows us to play with aspects of our nature that we experience as taboo.
People are afraid to think of themselves as machines, that the are controlled, predictable, determined, just as they are afraid to link of themselves as “driven” by sexual or aggressive impulses. But in the end, even if fearful, people want to explore their sexual and aggressive dimensions; hence, the evocative power and popular appeal of psychoanalytic ideas. Similarly, although fearful, peo ple want to find a way to think about what they experience as the machine aspect of their natures; this is at the heart of the computer’s holding power. Thinking about the self as a machine includes the feeling of being “run” from the outside, out of control because in the control of something beyond the self. Exploring the parts of ourselves that we do not feel in control of is a way to begin to own them, a way to feel more whole.
To extrapolate from this analysis: We like to think about artificial intelligence because we want to vicariously experience the subjectivity of a machine and enjoy, for that time, the idea of being a machine, of not being individually responsible for our actions or their consequences, and to thereby enjoy simply what we are “made” to do. In other words, it is a submissive fantasy of being made into a robot and having to obey orders. It is a way of eroticizing the experience of a loss of agency. That reminds me a lot of the “machine zone” of video-gambling addiction, where fate is mastered by total surrender to it and to the rhythms and determinations of the gaming machine. It feels good because there is only one way to lose, and it is inevitable.
Again, this analysis needs to be adjusted to accommodate the experience of using networked computers, which calibrate our experience of agency with a sense of connectivity and dependence, a sense of inescapable intersubjectivity in which we are always in the midst of thinking with a group. Often in these cases, the lost sense of agency may be a concrete signal of social belonging, a reassurance that one has been permitted to participate in a collective subjectivity. Not only might our self be made up of myriad biological programs running within our brain, producing consciousness as a kind of epiphenomenon, but those programs are interacting with the programs of other brains and are being coordinated beyond our understanding. We are one small machine running a subroutine in an emerging consciousness that is and isn’t our own.
Trying to vicariously experience machine-hood then becomes a way to try to imagine consciousness beyond individualist atomization. Thinking like a machine becomes a matter of thinking unselfishly rather than thinking without feeling.