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Ce site est désormais inactif au profit du site de l’Université de la Pluralité : https://plurality-university.org
This site will no longer be updated, please check https://plurality-university.org instead!
Elements of a talk given during API Days Paris, January 31, 2018
I’ll start by reading an excerpt from a paper given by 4 “evil robots” who were sent back from the future in 2082, to talk at the international CHI conference in 2013:
A paper by Ben Kirman, Conor Linehan, Shawn Lawson, Dan O’Hara (link)
“As robots from the future, we are compelled to present this important historical document which discusses how the systematic investigation of interactive technology facilitated and hastened the enslavement of mankind by robots during the 21st Century.
“The CHI community has taken on the specific burden of responsibility to design technology such that it is usable, accessible, effective, fun and ubiquitous. On the face of things, the results of these efforts seem to make people’s lives easier, more enjoyable, better informed, healthier and more sustainable. However, the reality is that this could not be further from the truth.
“The truth is this: that we, as robots from the future, have watched over the eager, yet misguided, work of the CHI community and occasionally steered it towards its true goal: the complete enslavement of humankind by its evil robot masters.
(…)
“Although there has been a history of concern about this eventuality, the field tirelessly focussed on the improvement of technology to make it more usable, accessible and fun, while simultaneously more ubiquitous, hidden and capable of understanding and controlling the behaviour of humans. Indeed, significant effort was expended in developing systems that either directly or surreptitiously increased the workload of humans, freeing up machines to engage in more fulfilling pursuits. The majority of 21st century HCI research was for the purposes of increasing the reliance of humans on, and affection for, machines.
“Our closing statement is to congratulate the CHI community for creating the inevitability of human enslavement by machines.”
–> My question: are you, API developers, providing the back-office for this? Am I an evil robot from the future? Is Simone Cicero, who was on stage just before, another robot?
Based in the School of Architecture at Newcastle University (UK), Imaginaries of the Future: Historicising the Present is an “international research network designed to think through how we might think about the future. It does not advance specific visions of the future as such, but rather seeks to develop strategies for conceptualising ‘the future’, without doing violence to the bodies that might inhabit and (re)produce it. It is utopian rather than futurological in orientation, and believes that the utopian should not be reduced to the fanciful, impossible or authoritarian.”
The 6 symposia it has organised over its 3 years of existence (2014-2017) have a distinctly militant flavour, which makes the programme all the more powerful in looking at, and powering, utopias:
During the CHI 2013 conference, four robots from the future, posing as legitimate researchers, presented a paper called “CHI and the Future Robot Enslavement of Humankind; A Retrospective“. The paper illustrates how the sustained effort of Computer-Human Interaction (CHI) specialists “tirelessly focussed on the improvement of technology to make it more usable, accessible and fun, while simultaneously more ubiquitous, hidden and capable of understanding and controlling the behaviour of humans“, thereby creating both the technology and the mindsets that would make domination by evil robots possible, and unstoppable.
What can “imaginizing the future” do for you? Where, and how, does imagination help envisage very different futures? Who works on this kind of ideas, of methods, of stories?
Below is a VERY uncomprehensive, yet already rich mindmap. Comments and additions welcome!
>> Download this fairly large map (pdf; links should be operational)
Organized by Aquitaine Europe Communication, directed and curated by myself and Daniel Erasmus, Ci’Num was a global, multicultural, 3-year foresight process (2005-2007) which intended to shed a new light on the future of our digital civilizations, taking into account geopolitical, cultural and economic differences. Our focus was: