This event is organized by the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society.
Note: Event details may change. Please refer to the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society’s events page for the most current information.
Our weekly SRI Seminar Series welcomes Lucy Suchman, professor emeritus at Lancaster University and former principal scientist at Xerox PARC. A foundational figure in the field of human–machine interaction, Suchman is the author of Plans and Situated Actions (1987) and Human-Machine Reconfigurations (2007), widely cited works that have reshaped our understanding of how people engage with intelligent systems.
Suchman’s current research continues her long-standing critical engagement with artificial intelligence, focusing on the use of robotics in both healthcare and military contexts. Through this work, she examines how automation mediates questions of labor, humanity, and justice—and how these domains are increasingly entangled in complex, ethically charged ways.
Moderator: Sheila McIlraith, Department of Computer Science
Location: Online
Talk title:
“Closed worlds and the constitutive outsides of artificial intelligence”
Abstract:
This lecture is offered as a contribution to the small but expanding movement to resist the proposition that artificial intelligence (AI) is the driving technology of our age. The aim is to anchor debate about the efficacy of algorithmic technologies in their politics, raising a set of questions otherwise absent from the discussion. I explore those questions in the domain on which my own research is focused, the martial epistemologies of data-driven warfighting, which is where algorithmic intensification has its most immediately lethal effects. The erasure of liveliness is central to the military programme, rendering always potentially unruly persons inside the machine as disciplined operators, while dehumanising those who are its justificatory targets.
The closed world is a trope, articulated most famously by historian of science Paul Edwards (1996), for the technopolitical imaginary of dominance and containment that underwrote the Cold War arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union at the close of the 20th century. Through a critical examination of the current U.S. project of Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2), I examine the rebirth of AI as the promissory technological fix aimed at securing militarism’s future. I read documentary sources produced by the United States Department of Defense, along with defense related media reports and analyses, against recent challenges to the technopolitical imaginary of closed world militarism based on critical scholarship, investigative journalism, and creative diplomacy. These counter-stories challenge the attempt within martial epistemologies to make clean demarcations of enmity within complex relations of affinity and difference, recovering the realities that escape datafication and opening spaces in which to consider demilitarization and the possibilities for reparative future-making.
Suggested reading:
Lucy Suchman, “The algorithmically accelerated killing machine,” AI Now, January 24, 2024.
Lucy Suchman and Caja Thimm, "There is no such thing as a machine that acts outside of relations with humans,” Human-Machine Communication 9, 2024. Pp. 25–35.
Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal, Théo Lepage-Richer, and Lucy Suchman, Neural networks. Meson Press, 2024.
Lucy Suchman, “The uncontroversial 'thingness’ of AI,” Big Data & Society 10(2), 2023.
Lucy Suchman, “Imaginaries of omniscience: Automating intelligence in the U.S. Department of Defense,” Social Studies of Science 53(5), 2022. Pp. 761-786.
Lucy Suchman, “Algorithmic warfare and the reinvention of accuracy,” Critical Studies on Security 8(2), 2020. Pp. 175–187.
About Lucy Suchman
Lucy Suchman is a professor emeritus of the anthropology of science and technology at Lancaster University. She was previously a principal scientist at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), where she spent twenty years as a researcher. During this period, she became widely recognized for her critical engagement with artificial intelligence, as well as her foundational contributions to a deeper understanding of both the essential connections and the profound differences between humans and machines.
Suchman is the author of Human-Machine Reconfigurations (2007) and Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication (1987), both published by Cambridge University Press. She was a founding member of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, and served on its Board of Directors from 1982–1990. In 2002, she received the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Sciences, in 2010 the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI) Lifetime Research Award, and in 2014 the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) Bernal Prize for Distinguished Contributions to the Field. She was President of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) during 2016 and 2017. In April of 2016, Suchman was an expert panelist at the UN’s Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, as a member of ICRAC.
Suchman’s current research extends her longstanding engagement with the field of artificial intelligence to challenge the place of robots in both healthcare and warfare. She is interested in the ways in which these seemingly opposite domains are joined through questions of the value placed on labour and humanity, and in their consequences for social justice and the possibility for a more humane and less violent world.
About the SRI Seminar Series
The SRI Seminar Series brings together the Schwartz Reisman community and beyond for a robust exchange of ideas that advance scholarship at the intersection of technology and society. Seminars are led by a leading or emerging scholar and feature extensive discussion.
Each week, a featured speaker will present for 45 minutes, followed by an open discussion. Registered attendees will be emailed a Zoom link before the event begins. The event will be recorded and posted online.