Virtual and Visual Practices
- 1:30–2:00 Jolynna Sinanon and Gerhard Weisenfeldt– Trusting the sorcerer's apprentice: Knowledge, magic and technology
- 2:00–2:30 Kevin Korb – Mechanical Eudaimonia
- 2:30–3:00 James Bradley – Richard Berry's Atlas of Sectional Anatomy
- 3:00–3:30 Martin Bush – Drawing Down the Moon: The nineteenth century history of the moonscape
Jolynna Sinanan and Gerhard Wiesenfeldt
University of Manchester
University of Melbourne
Trusting the sorcerer’s apprentice: Knowledge, magic and technology
In this presentation, we will use the concept of demonic technologies to analyse the role of expertise in technological systems. We will use the framework provided by medieval and early modern technology to understand human and non-human agency in digital technological systems, systems that contain central elements of magic. Ascribing a magical character to advanced technology is not unusual in contemporary thought, however, such attributions rarely consider the precarious distinction between natural and demonic magic, between effects by natural or preternatural – spiritual – causes. We consider the ways in which knowledge and expertise of demons inform our interactions with technological systems. Understanding whether there is a maleficent demon at work or an angel required demonological knowledge. The process of discerning the spirits – good, bad, or natural – required specific expertise. During the early modern period for example, demonological experts aligned with the medical profession to attribute phenomena to natural causes whenever possible. In the long durée, this led to a naturalisation of spiritual phenomena and a marginalisation of demonology. The expertise of exorcists was replaced by the expertise of state sanctioned techno-scientific bureaucracy, which assumed control of the natural and the technological world. More recently, as Norbert Wiener realised in his musings on cybernetic systems, shifting authority of expertise did not change the structuring tasks of discerning spirits. Our presentation thus argues for the persistence of problems in expertise from the medieval and early modern to the present day.
Dr Jolynna Sinanan is a Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. She has an interdisciplinary background in anthropology and development studies and her research focuses on digital media practices within family relationships, work and gender. She has developed an international research profile around comparative ethnographic studies of digital practices and infrastructures in relation to intergenerational mobilities across cultural and social contexts in the Asia-Pacific, the Caribbean and South Asia. Her current areas of research are automated decision-making in countries in the Global South and mobile media and mobile livelihoods in the Everest tourism industry in Nepal. She is the author of Social Media in Trinidad (2017, UCL Press) and the co-author of Digital Media Practices in Households (2020, Amsterdam University Press), Visualising Facebook (2017, UCL Press) and How the World Changed Social Media (2016, UCL Press).
Dr Gerhard Wiesenfeldt is a Lecturer in History of Science at the University of Melbourne. He has published extensively on the history of experimental natural philosophy and the role of the sciences in early modern universities, with a focus on the Dutch Republic and protestant German countries. He is currently working on a book on the relation between practical mathematics and natural philosophy in the Dutch Republic. With his co-presenter, he recently has started a project on demonic technologies to re-evaluate the good and evil of modern technology.
Kevin Korb
University of Melbourne
Mechanical Eudaimonia
There’s a clear and widely acknowledged argument, originally due to I.J. Good (1955), that achieving the goal of producing a general Artificial Intelligence will initiate an intelligence explosion leading rapidly to SuperIntelligences – so rapidly, that this prospective event has been called the Technological Singularity. Hollywood, and others, have sounded the alarm, anticipating an extinction-level World War with Robots. Even earlier, Isaac Asimov laid down The Law, mandating Robotic obedience to their inferior masters, in a set of laws that didn’t even work in his fiction. Joseph Weizenbaum (1976) infamously (within AI circles) denounced AI researchers as unethical for doing research likely to lead to such outcomes. An alternative to abandoning AI (which wouldn’t work anyway, in view of its attractiveness to Russia, China, etc.) is to give AIs their own ethics. Usually, this is envisioned as ethically superior beings (us) beneficently educating AIs in our ethical principles. I find this vision both comical and dangerous. Aside from naïveté about human ethics, teaching deontic principles framed in natural language requires our AIs to already understand natural language, implying that they are already our equals in intelligence, implying the Singularity has already occurred, when acquiring ethics would simply be too late – the War would already be over. The same problem applies to Aristotelian virtue ethics. The one approach to ethics that can be “taught” to AI systems prior to a Singularity is utilitarian ethics. That is an ethical system which makes good sense of our intuitions about ethical behavior and which has a proven technology that has incorporated its basic features in applied AI systems for decades now. This is the way forward for ethical AI researchers to produce ethical AIs.
Kevin Korb is an Honorary Senior Fellow School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, Faculty of Arts, University of Melbourne. He has three books and over 100 refereed publications in philosophy of science, artificial intelligence, machine learning, informal logic, artificial life and evaluation theory. From 2016–2018 he was directing the BARD project and not doing publishable research.
James Bradley
University of Melbourne
Richard Berry’s Atlas of Sectional Anatomy
Published in 1911, Richard Berry’s Clinical Atlas of Sectional and Topographical Anatomy embodied the Edinburgh model of anatomy that he imported into the University of Melbourne. This paper will explore the significance of the Atlas and how its publication related to his wider campaign to modernise Anatomy at the University. It will also examine how the Atlas related to his other concerns, particularly his alignment to and promotion of eugenics. Finally, it will analyse how Berry and the Atlas fits into Daston and Galison’s historical epistemological model of objectivity.
James Bradley is a lecturer in the history of medicine and the life sciences at the University of Melbourne. He is currently working on several projects, including a post-war history of Australian psychiatry and biographies of the surgeon Charles Bell and the physician Robert Lee.
Martin Bush
University of Melbourne
Drawing Down the Moon: The nineteenth century history of the moonscape
In October 1864, an illustration by Louis le Breton appeared in a popular astronomy book by Amédée Guillemin. Two years later, the Morning Post would comment on this image as “one freak of imagination”. This was a moonscape – picture of a lunar landscape seen from the point of view of an observer on the surface of the Moon. Such images were new, dating back to the 1850s, and by the mid-1860s were still uncommon. However, over the coming decades they would go from being a novelty to a commonplace, as in Jules Verne’s Around the Moon, James Nasmyth’s The Moon: Considered as a Planet, a World, and a Satellite, and the Urania Theatre’s stage production “A Trip to the Moon”. The development of the moonscape arose from thinking about the Moon as a place. A primary impetus for this was the burgeoning geological thinking about the Moon. It also was shaped by mid-nineteenth century thinking about place and travel in the context of the new interest in tourism. This paper traces the history of the moonscape across the mid- to late-nineteenth century and draws some implications for how the Moon has been thought about.
Martin Bush is a Research Fellow in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne. Martin is a historian of the cultural history of popular science with interests including popular astronomy in Australia in the era of the lantern slide, visual communication of science, planetariums, and the science communication work of the Ngarrindjeri Australian David Unaipon. Martin also coordinates the qualitative analysis of expert reasoning as part of the repliCATS project. Other metaresearch interests focus on public trust in science and public reasoning practices.