How Will New Technology Transform Human Interactions?
Daniel Faggella
2015-12-15 00:00:00



Hayles, who generally defines assemblage as a connection that’s loose enough for the addition and subtraction of parts, prefers to view the Internet as an assemblage rather than a network, based on the different dynamics with which humans interact. The Internet’s combination of people signing on and logging off, along with a continuous flux and flow amidst very precise protocols that govern how communication and traffic takes place, is what makes it a perfect illustration of an assemblage, says Hayles.

The Changing Notions of Assemblage

“Assemblage is a term that’s taken cultural theory by storm,” Katherine said. “Assemblage \is a word that has become popular in cultural discourse because it plays a very central role in Gilles Deleuze's and Felix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.”



In the 20th century, Deleuze and Guattari argued that capitalism fosters a kind of schizophrenia in the way it alienates workers from their own inner essence, Hayles said. In the mind of Deleuze, the best way to combat the influences of capitalism was to abandon the entire contextual nexus around which capitalism is structured, such as a coherent subject, an organism, or a sign system. Hayles describes Deleuze as writing against abstract conceptualization, with a desire to liberate a form of flow of forces that were constantly changing.

According to Hayles, Deleuze was something of a technophobe who didn't project his ideas into the technical realm. However, in the second generation of Deleuze-ian influences, there are people specifically trying to apply his ideas to digital media and other life forms, like insects. Hayles cited Jussi Parikka’s book, Insect Media, https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/insect-media which thinks about swarms as a form of technical assemblage that is constantly subject to rearrangement.

This line of thinking parallels the Internet, with its constant rearrangement and packet switching and so forth, she said. “The power of (Deleuze’s) ideas is still being played out very much now in cultural theory,” explains Hayles. “I don't go so far as Deleuze went, but I understand how you could think in those terms when you think about human technical assemblages.”

Another prime example of a human technical assemblage is cell phone communication. While it has fundamentally transformed the way people think about accessing information and communicating with others at all times, the greater effect is in the younger generation, which has grown up with cell phones. An older generation that didn’t have cell phones as children or even as young adults has a different technical infrastructure. These illustrations show the role human technical assemblages play in the evolution of human cultural life, says Katherine.

Today’s Assemblage Landscape

Hayles points to the sociometer developed by Alex Pentland at the MIT Media Lab as an example of one of the newer, more exciting assemblages. The sociometer study aims to determine social network structures that arise within human groups based on the detection of what Pentland calls “honest signals.”



These honest signals, which are almost impossible to fake and include voice intensity, body language, and more, were developed first in evolutionary terms and exist in both humans and animals. The person wearing a sociometer device would be able to consciously interpret and intercept those non-conscious signals; by extension, that person would then be able to make nonconscious cognition visible through technical intervention.

As the cognitive abilities of technical systems continues to increase, Hayles believes the entire dynamics of the planetary cognitive ecology (i.e. all biological life forms that have cognitive capabilities at some level that allow them to interact with the environment) have shifted dramatically. As computational systems take over many operations that were previously done by humans, she believes the bottleneck created by the limits of human consciousness is on a trajectory to be overtaken by technical autonomy. That trajectory, says Hayles, could lead to some dangerous areas.

Technology May Take the Reins

“It raises deep cultural and ethical questions about how far this technical autonomy should extend and under what circumstances. A good example of where this issue has become urgent is the development of autonomous warfighters,” Hayles said. “(Ronald) Arkin at Georgia Tech makes the argument that a robot warfighter could be more ethical than a human, because you could program restraints into it. That is subject to debate on many levels, but its illustrative of the kinds of problems that are going to arise with this tight connection between human and technical cognition and the trajectory toward increasing technical autonomy.”

The ethics of advancing technical systems is undoubtedly a big next step in the evolution of smarter computers and AI, bridging abstract concepts with the growing reality of an ever plugged-in and interconnected world.

Image #1: Dr. Katherine Hayles
Image #3: Sociometric Badge