Technology as Skilled Practice || AGENTS AND ARTEFACTS

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AGENTS AND ARTEFACTSAuthor(s): John PickeringSource: Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice, Vol. 41, No.1, Technology as Skilled Practice (March 1997), pp. 46-63Published by: Berghahn BooksStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23171731 .

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SOCIAL ANALYSIS No. 41(1), March 1997

AGENTS AND ARTEFACTS

John Pickering

Introduction

Computer technology has given rise to agent like artefacts that are becoming intimately involved in social action. As such agents become more autonomous and

more capable of seemingly natural interaction with human beings the involvement

deepens. Circumstances already arise where it is difficult or unimportant to disting uish between technologised human agents and humanised technological artefacts,

especially for the young. Machines are now, more than ever, involved in the

evolution of technologies and related skilled practices, and as participants rather than mere tools.

The autonomous machine that concerned Samuel Butler in Erewhon is thus very

much with us. The blending of people with machines has been a commonplace of

cyberpunk writing for almost two decades. But, fiction aside, the fact is that techno

logy has played a significant role in human cultural evolution over the past two million years. From the earliest stone tools to nanotechnology there has been a prog ressive increase in the importance of artefacts to human practices and the posthuman

condition is beginning to be discussed as a technological project (Pepperell 1996).

This paper considers the place of computer technology in this progression,

particularly the role of artefacts that simulate elementary psychological powers in the

integration of machinic and human practices. It is argued that one aspect of this role will be to develop skilled practices for the social interaction of humans and machines.

Rogoffs distinction between three levels of human sociocultural learning is used to

suggest more specifically how these practices may arise (Rogoff 1995). Also relevant

here are recent developments in evolutionary theory and in psychology, as well as

Ingold's critique of the conventionalised distinction between biology and culture

(Ingold 19%). Taken together, these elements provide a framework within which to address the assimilation of technology in the process of human development.

Social interaction with machine intelligence is beaming more realistic. It is not

important whether machine intelligence is considered to be "the same as" human

intelligence. Nor is it important to decide whether systems that leam and evolve are in fact autonomous agents. Whether the agency of artefacts comes from human

design or whether it emerges as the artefact develops, what is important is that

artefacts can become agent like. Simulation is enough. The possibility of interacting with artefacts as if they were agents will mean that they are treated as such. This will

give them a role in creating the habitus of contemporary technocratic societies. 46



Habitus is here being used, as by Bourdieu, to mean not only the material conditions of a culture but its sensitivities and values as well (Bourdieu 1984). New values and sensitivities are being created as people and machinic agents co-operate. As artefacts

develop basic social abilities or attributes, they will participate in the development and transmission of skilled practices from one generation to the next.

The participation of machinic agents is growing rapidly as computer technology changes the habitus of education, work, the arts and domestic life. The practices and

values thus created are assimilated by individuals as they develop within technocratic

cultures. As McLuhan pointed out, assimilating technology changes consciousness.

The systematic observation of this assimilation, especially by the young, has become an important ethnographic task.

Growing up with technology

Rogoffs analysis of sociocultural learning blends the pragmatism of Dewey with the action theory of Vygotsky and Leontiev. Knowledge is not abstract or formal in

essence, although it may be made so. Rather, it arises through and is for action. Aside from formalised education, knowledge and the values that go with it are

transmitted through cultural activities, technological practices and everyday social

interaction, particularly that between children and the adult world. From these

elements, Rogoff developed a three level model of qualitatively distinct but

overlapping processes through which individuals assimilate the sociocultural

practices of others.

At the most explicit level is apprenticeship. This is a broadening of the conven

tional usage beyond the simple acquisition of craft or artistic skills. It is a collective term for activities such as education, training and instruction of all sorts. Apprent iceship is what happens when learners who know they are learning participate with teachers who know they are teaching to develop specific skills and knowledge.

At the next level there is guided participation. Here, explicit instruction is not in volved. Nonetheless individuals learn through taking part with others in collective

activities that leave a residue of skills and knowledge. These collective activities

need not be mediated through direct social interaction. Rather they are mediated

through any activities which transmit skills and knowledge from those who have

them to those who do not. Instruction may not be the primary purpose of these

activities, indeed, it usually is not, but it is an important and direct result.

Participatory appropriation is perhaps the least explicit and consensual mode of sociocultural learning. It is closely related to guided participation with the important distinction that it is personal, tends to be creative and to individualise knowledge. While the former two categories deal in knowledge and practices that are to some

extent pre-given, this latter category also deals with ways of participation that

originate with the individual. The former two categories are more likely to involve the individual in internalising the goals, knowledge and values of their sociocultural

setting. The latter category, however, is more akin to individuals making for them

47



selves a style and a unique set of practices which are the means to achieve goals they

have set themselves.

In making this distinction, Rogoff asks basic questions about social learning such as: What is learned? Where and how is it stored? What are the effects of this

learning? In what activities does learning arise? What are these activities and how

do individuals relate to each other when they are being carried out? Such questions can all be asked about the role of technology in social learning. They help create a

framework within which technology can be related to the broader sweep of cultural

evolution.

Technology and the Posthuman Condition.

Ingold (1996) points out a number of difficulties with the conventional distinction between biological and cultural evolution, and therefore, between evolution and

history. His major point is the neglect of development by evolutionary theorists.

Human beings develop within an envelope of skilled practices and the material

artefacts associated with than. Together these constitute a self-replicating system

that leave a permanent trace, both within the environment and with the body. For

example, practices to do with posture and gait are reflected in the growth of the body. These could be seen as the impress of 'extraneous' cultural influences on a 'fund

amental' biological pattern. This promotes the idea that cultural evolution is a hist orical superstructure built upon a relatively stable biological condition. But as recent

developments in evolutionary theory show, the stability of species is not merely a

biological matter (Johnston & Gottlieb 1990). This is particularly so for the human

condition, where cultural and biological factors have blended in the evolutionary emergence of modern human beings (Kingdon 1993). Accordingly, the distinction between biology and culture, while useful when considering the human condition as it now is, should not be taken as a well defined boundary between biological evolution and human history.

Ingold's critique concentrates on bodily skills, such as the use of tools or modes

of walking. For example, he notes that the effects on the skeleton produced by

particular traditions for carrying and squatting are considered as the imposition of a

cultural practice on a distinct biological form (Molleson 1994). He suggests that it is more appropriate to view them as a trace of both cultural and biological systems

which together stabilise the human form. Now the human skeleton is relatively resis

tant to change when compared with the brain, whose very nature is to be plastic and

to assimilate external influences. Ingold's critique, therefore, is clearly extendible to the trace left in the mind by cultural practices. As Vygotsky recognised, physical, social and mental action rather than biology provide the form of human psychology. With the rise of intelligent machines, cultural practices will incorporate social interaction between developing human beings and technological artefacts. This is the interaction that is now being represented as part of a change from the human to the

posthuman condition (Pepperell 1996).

48



The posthuman condition is prefigured in the work of cyberpunk writers such as William Gibson and Bruce Sterling who depict human beings blending with non human technology. Bodies are invaded by minute cybernetic intelligences and the senses are hugely amplified by electronic means. The body is no longer the necessary vehicle for experience and agency. Instead individuals diffuse into virtual worlds of disembodied powers and feelings (Sterling 1986). Dismissed by some as mere

literary tropes, such writing is considered by others to have anticipated the

remarkable growth of global networked communications such as the Internet, or the

prosthetic application of nanotechnology and the convergence of biology, psychology and computer science into what is now commonly referred to as artificial life (Gray 1995, Langton 1995). As technology becomes more organic, so the organic is

technologised and increasingly brought within the sphere of human social concern and action. There are even serious discussions of how human beings, once liberated from the body and expressed through technology, might effectively become eternal

(Armstrong 1996, Moravec 1988). The notion that the body can somehow become redundant seems unlikely and will

not be pursued here. Even so, it is clear that computer technology raises fundamental

issues about the boundary between the human and the non-human, about the

preservation of identity and the blending of the artificial and the natural (Robertson et

al. 19%, Haraway 1991 and 1995). Indeed, the scientific approach to the 'natural' is more technologised than ever before. In psychology, for example, the idea that the brain is much like a computer is no longer treated as just another metaphor. Now taken in a far more literal sense, it is advanced as the best candidate for a unified

theory for all aspects of mental life (Newell 1991, Churchland 1986, Johnson-Laird

1989). In this sense, the present era of psychology is the era of cognitivism, much as the middle of the century was the era of behaviourism ( Valsiner 1991).

Does this make the notion of the posthuman condition less of a literary conceit

and support the idea that technology and human biology may be blendable? For the

purposes of this article, the answer will be taken as "no". Common sense suggests that the posthuman cyborg is not a realistic option. However, the image helps weak en the idea that there is, or ever was, a pre-given, biologically definable human

condition that can be qualitatively distinguished from a radically technologised posthuman condition. The emergence of the human condition was always a matter of

the progressive integration of technology with biological and social practices. This, as Ingold points out, is especially true of those practices surrounding human devel

opment, which have an important role in both stabilising and directing cultural evolution.

Cultural evolution is a progressive change in technology, tools and the practces that go with them. Because this change is directed, it is Lamarckian. It has replaced Darwinian modes of biological evolution as the principal mode of human

development, both individual and collective. This mode of evolution is not merely the

consequence of chance events, as reductionists might have it (Campbell 1974, Monod

1971). Rather, it is based on constantly re-negotiated cultural goals and values.

These, along with aesthetic sensitivities and social skills are assimilated with the

49



language, customs, myths and artefacts, what Bourdieu calls the habitus, of a culture

or community of practice (Bourdieu 1984). What is significant about the latest phase in cultural evolution is that the artefacts themselves are developing the capacity for

rudimentary psychological and social skills.

Posthuman? We Were Never Human

Lewis Mumford's early works such as Technics and Civilisation and The Culture of Cities, both written in the 1930s, chart the progression of technology and human

practices cm a very long timescale (Mumford 1968). He proposes eotechnic, paleo technic and neotechnic phases to cover, in rough approximation, tool making, power

generation and information handling. These remarkably far-seeing works show how

technology makes possible new conditions of cultural and social interaction. They also help to understand the technological shaping of cultural conditions within which human beings develop. Their optimistic humanism is a sobering contrast to some of his later works, such as The Pentagon of Power, written at the time of Vietnam,

where he warns about the abuse of technology. Mumford shows that technology is not merely the means by which pre-given and

relatively unchanging human needs are met. Rather it helps to create fundamentally new forms of human activity from which new goals, values and desires emerge. Technology creates the cultural envelope within which human beings develop and

from which they assimilate, with modification, a system of values and goals. These

are not always explicitly defined or transmitted by processes of formal education.

They may, fa- example, be carried by the built environment and the practices that go with it (Sinha 1988).

The 'natural' home of most of human kind is thus a value laden artefact, a

semiotic system (Elias 1989). Kingdon suggests that acceleration of human evolution in the late Pliocene had a great deal to do with the development of semiotic systems for transmitting tool technology (Kingdon 1993). He also suggests that this will have had genetic consequences. In a socially co-operative species like hominids, the genome will have evolved under the selection pressure to assimilate the collective

seiniodc practices that transmitted tool technology. This will have created a hybrid

system in which genetic and extra-genetic vehicles for inheritance were blended and

which was responsible for the relatively rapid appearance of modem hominids. This, as Kingdon suggests, means that the human genome has followed in the

wake, as it were, of this largo- hybrid system. This neo-Lamarckian mode of evolut ion is similar to that proposed by Piaget and Waddington, among others. A number of recent developments in evolutionary theory do in fact propose that the human

genome is not as isolated as conventional neo-Darwinism suggests. For example, there are good arguments for the view that the genome is not a morphological blue

print (Johnston & Gottlieb 1990, Goodwin 1994); the development of the brain may be far more influenced by assimilation of environmental influences than was pre

viously thought (Edelman 1992) and the continuity of ontogenetic and phylogenetic learning is becoming more widely accepted (Plotkin 1988, Maynard-Smith 1987).

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Thus, both human evolution and development are bound up with a system in which biology and culture are integrated. Sociocultural relations within this system have become increasingly mediated by technology. It is within these relations that individuals develop and learn to participate in the practices and to recognise the values that surround them. In the human case the surroundings of the developing individual are shaped by previous human beings to a far greater extent than for any other species. The mutuality of organism and environment that is true for all species has been radically amplified by the loop created by the fact that human beings develop within an environment that is created by human beings themselves.

Thus, there never was a human condition to begin with. Not, that is, in the sense

of a biological species. The large overlap between the genetic constitution of apes and humans demonstrates that the rapid evolutionary appearance of human beings was a cultural, not a biological event. What the environment affords a particular

species is, in most cases, cmly marginally affected by the past actions of the species in

question. However, the human environment is almost totally shaped by the actions

of other humans. Thus it is unproductive to assume that what makes humans diff

erent from non-humans exists 'inside' the organism. It is more important to under

stand that human development is far more under the influence of the environment

than that of any other species. Since the human environment is itself a cultural

product, this means that human beings are, as Kingdon suggests, 'self-produced'. Maturana and Varela call this process of self production 'autopoesis' and propose

that it describes the mutuality of all organisms and their environment (Maturana & Varela 1992). In the human case however, this condition has been radically intensified by cultural practices which surround individuals as they develop draw out

and shape an innate predisposition towards action. These practices now involve artefacts which simulate human social skills. As Mumford reminds us, technological artefacts do not only match a static set of human values and goals, they also create

new (Hies. As artefacts become social, so new values and goals will appear,

contingent on the skilled practices that arise in interaction with them.

Learning these practices may require another individual to act as intermediary, model or teacher, recalling RogofTs classification. It may be, however, that an object creates practices by itself, much as an implement instructs the user how to wield it. It

is in this sense that culturally produced opportunities for action may be considered to

be social, whether provided by objects, situations or people (Costall 1995). This is what is interesting about artefacts with the capacity for social interaction, and adds to

Ingold's critique of the boundary between biology and culture the blending of human

agency with non-human artefacts.

Of course, human social interaction has been mediated by artefacts such as the

telephone for many decades. What is significant about recent technology is that the artefacts themselves appear to participate in the interaction, rather than acting as

merely a means to put human beings in touch with each other. Of course, what use human beings make of agent-like artefacts cannot be predicted exactly. The use

made of an artefact is often surprising to the designer. Moreover, when the artefacts

can both be modified by the user and modify themselves, they pass even further

beyond the control of the designer. Pfaffenberger's point (1995) that computer tech 51



nology is creating new fields of social relationships, will be amplified in a unique way when computers are understood to participate in, rather than merely mediate

these relationships.

Artificial intelligence and artificial life

In a suitably ironic post-modern exchange of identity, recent developments in biology and psychology reveal that people are more like artefacts than might have been

thought and that artefacts may able to become more like people than perhaps we

feared.

Artificial intelligence (AI), the structuralist heart of cognitivism, has developed a murmur. A radical transplant is in progress to replace it by the post-structuralist

project of artificial life (AL). This is a research programme that combines biology, computing and psychology in order to express the logical form of life in artefacts

(Langton 1995). The aim is to build complete creatures that leam and evolve rather

than to capture the formal essence of intelligence in a computer program (Brooks

1991a). Much of the intelligence expressed in AL systems is not pre-programmed but evolves within an arena of action (Brooks 1991b, 1991c). The shift from AI to AL tracks an important change that will provide a psychological theory more

appropriate to understanding the cultural assimilation of technology. The shift, broadly speaking, is from cognitivism to situated action.

Cognitivism reduced the mind to a machine in the head and created a research

programme for testing theories of how this machine might work. Cultural practices were of no immediate significance and would have to wait for the fundamentals of

mental life, the operating principles of the machine in the head, to be properly understood (Gardner 1985:6). The operating principles themselves were taken to be

formalisable, either as mental language (Fodor 1990) or as a Turing machine (Hamad 1992). Although this programme is criticised for neglecting both biology (Edelman 1992) and culture (Bruner 1990: ch.l), it remains the principal paradigm for most of

cognitive science (e.g. Benjafield 19%). This reductive enterprise expresses an implicit belief that mental life is a

culturally and historically independent natural kind. The content of mental operations

may be assimilated from culture but the operations themselves and the brain

structures that carry them out are not. In sharp and productive contrast, approaches to

mental life as an aspect of situated action, consider it to be something carried within a

system of which oily a part is in the head. The research programme this generates is less concerned to formalise intelligence and more concerned with a ethnographic natural history of human practices (Lave & Wenger 1991, Costall & Leudar 1996).

While AL is not yet developed enough to take part in this research programme, it

signifies a shift in the right direction. Psychology is moving away from cognitivism and towards the treatment of cognition as something that emerges when capacities for action are expressed in situations. This theoretical stance offers a far better fit with

pragmatists and action theorists alike. Once mental life is no longer seen merely as formalisable mechanisms in the head, the way is clearer to understanding the cultural

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nature of human intelligence and to paying more informed attention to how mental

life develops through sociocultural learning. Human psychological capacities are em

bodied in a form of life that has a unique evolutionary history in which biological and cultural factors are more closely integrated than for any other species.

It is during development that biology and culture interact to the most significant effect. The sociocultural learning that is the medium for this interaction is increas

ingly mediated by technology. This has now given rise to artefacts able to participate in social processes and to take over some of what one human being has traditionally

done for another, for example, in the various types of sociocultural learning. As

Rogoff shows, this transmission is often carried out through implicit social inter actions between human beings that transmit sensitivities and values as well as skills.

If human beings adapt themselves to machines, new, as it were machinic,

sensitivities and values will enter the human arena. This process is already clear in

the way that software induces skills, mental images, habits and preferences in its

users, as anyone who has had to learn to use both Macintosh and Microsoft operating

systems will know. Here we see a similar technological imperative to that of the Berlin Key described by Latour (1996). Indeed, a software object like an operating system is far more capable of far more powerful control than a piece of hardware like

a key. The participation by machines in real social action is now so far advanced that it

is no longer merely a matter of technology but ethics (Lanier 1995). Not just in the usual indirect sense of the use that is made of tools by human beings. Instead the

question is whether artefacts are mere tool-like adjuncts to human life or whether they

might become participants in our moral and aesthetic lives. Machines used to be built and then used. Now, once built, they learn and evolve. In doing so they may elicit in the human beings that interact with them a new type of skilled practice that

expresses cybernetic rather than human values. In conforming to these practices,

especially during development, human beings will change. This will continue the

process by which human beings have always accommodated to the social side effects

of technology. This will now involve accommodation to the intrinsic social capacities of artefacts. Recalling the contrast between Mumford's early and later writing, the

question arises as to whether this accommodation could diminish human autonomy

and worth.

Cyborgs aren't coming, they're here

As Mumford showed, technology not only amplifies human capacities, it also creates

needs, goals and values. Presently, cybernetic technology is amplifying human ca

pacities for social interaction. This may create new needs, skills and values that will be expressed in social relations. However, is there is anything here that is quali tatively different from previous phases in the evolution of technology, for example, that of the heat engine?

Consider cars and computers. The basic technology of the car may be approach ing a thermodynamic plateau. The futuristic aspect of the Vectra, Vauxhall's "car of

53



the future", lies in its advertising campaign rather than in the car itself. There is

nothing particularly advanced about what makes the Vectra reliable, safe and

economical. It is pretty much what manufacturers have been doing since about 1960.

What is happening here, in Baudrillard's terms, is the replacement of real production and distribution by the circulation of signs (Baudrillard 1993: ch.5). By contrast, Fordist modes of production, created by the heat-engine technology of the previous

century, that were still in place in the 1960s, have been radically altered. In the next

century cybernetic technology will consolidate post-Fordist modes of production (Harvey 1990). Here manufacture is dispersed and automated, assembly is multi sited and flexible, production planning is virtualised and management hierarchies are flattened. Through the convergence of stock control, customer surveys, order books

and market research, consumer choice is reaching into earlier and earlier stages of

design and prototyping. Cybernetic technology has not yet come to a plateau. How far there is yet to go is

impossible to know, but several orders of magnitude seems a conservative estimate

(Pearson & Cochrane 1995). An envelope of social relations mediated by this tech

nology is developing and moving down the age scale. What used to be an activity of adults at work is rapidly beaming what children do at school and in the home while

learning, playing and communicating. Cybernetics has moved from automating mun dane rationality to automating mundane sociality. Hybrid intelligent action involving people and computers is increasingly part of social situations. Computer systems help people to communicate, design and decide.

For adults, such systems can be threatening, leading to technophobic attitudes.

By contrast, the ease with which children get cm with computers is now commonly observed. Being able to operate and to co-operate with technology is not just to do with knowing how to make the video recorder work. It is about feeling at home with

machines that are beginning to use language, recognise individuals, make decisions

and offer advice. Being at ease with these human simulacra will have as much to do

with attitudes as with skills. Such simulacra are appearing in all areas of economic and social life. Cars now

have voices to remind the driver of things and to give advice. Portable computers now accept written and spoken inputs. These, unlike typing, are the property of in

dividuals, making the machine very much more a personal assistant than a mere tool.

Telephone systems are now computer systems which do a great deal more than put

people in contact with each other. These systems are in effect quasi social agents for

answering, asking questions, giving informing, holding callers, re-trying numbers that were engaged, informing users of another caller waiting, taking messages, re

routing enquiries and so mi. These systems are mediating the social politesse of tele

phone communication. Presently, the systems we typically encounter are easy to dis

tinguish from a real human being. With communication systems like email and the Internet in general the situation is different. These systems generally involve writing rather than speech and interactions do not occur in real time. Under these conditions

the distinction between human and non-human agency is increasingly hard and

occasionally unimportant to make. Computer agents sort, order, discard, answer and

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redirect electronic mail, field enquiries, answer questions, make recommendations

and so on.

While most households have a phone and TV only about a tenth presently have a

computer. However, the cost/power ratio of computers is improving and the cable is

ramifying through urban culture. As it setdes into its mature form, cybernetic agen cies of increasing sophistication and naturalness of use will appear. This is especially true with the rapid convergence of domestic computers, TVs, faxes, cable and

satellite systems, digital audio broadcasting, telephones and other media. Soon, children will be growing up with screens, keyboards, CD players, microphones and

loudspeakers that will be an integrated resource for education, communication,

recreation and entertainment. By then, a great deal of control will be invested in

quasi-social intelligent systems. Their forunners can already be seen in the increas

ingly naturalised operating systems of home computers. These prompt, instruct, ask

and autonomously act to provide the user with what they want. As systems converge, more sophisticated agents will help people to use them. In particular agents will be needed to handle communication between human beings and computer systems. The

complexities and subtlety of human-computer interaction and the constant changes to

computer systems make this a formidable problem of knowledge engineering. Recent work in this area has explored a solution based on artificial life (Maes

1995, Ray 1995). Software agents are being developed that can both learn and

evolve. These learn to interact with particular individuals and to acquire skills in

handling particular aspects of computer networks, such as the variations in traffic

density with time of day and global location. They evolve by making variants of themselves which are eliminated by selection pressures from human users, the

availability of resources within the network and interaction with other agents. Presently these techniques are being used to develop agents that help people locate,

sort and present information found on the internet. It is important to note that the

ways in which these agents work will not have been fully anticipated in the intentions

of a designer. If successful, they will be applicable in other areas of human computer

interaction, including communication itself. Accordingly, it is quite conceivable that

computer agents able to communicate in a relatively natural way, perhaps with a

particular individual, might be created by the individual themselves interacting with

evolving versions of the required agent. As the result would reflect the user as well

as the artefact, it could stand for the human original in some circumstances becoming some sort of a cybernetic doppelganger.

Computer systems have already become socialised and personalised to a remarkable degree. Supermarket tills not only display prices and product codes, but also provide help and supervision at a quite naturalistic level. They prompt the oper ator to ask the customer questions, to obtain signatures, to carry out various phases of the transactions and to watch out for errors. The till has access to a lot of information

the operator no longer needs to do their job. For example, if a customer asks the price of an item, the operator is quite unlikely to know it, but will obtain it from the machine. The level of prompting from and intervention by the till varies with the skill of the operator. With the checkout closed, operators can be trained by the till itself, with oily occasional interventions by a human supervisor required. Home

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computers, in addition to paper manuals, now come with extensive CD-ROM

tutorials. These can be on the machine and blend with the actual use of it, remaining

in the background and adjusting their interventions as the user becomes more skilled. When a difficulty arises adults are likely to say "where's the manual?" Children are more inclined to say "ask the computer".

Children who grow up using such systems may on occasion be unconcerned

about whether they are communicating with a human agent. They are likely to take more rapidly than adults to cybernetically mediated social interaction. For adults it

may feel as if an alien has arrived in the household and only the children can communicate with it. Unlike children, adults may be subconsciously concerned with whether or not they are dealing with another human being. Again, it is important to note that it is impossible to say exactly how this or that aspect of technology will be used in human activities. Even so, it seems clear here that something important is

emerging from the way human beings are growing up with technology that simulates

human social interaction.

It is becoming clear that such developments will influence how human beings

communicate with each other and how they think of themselves (Lanier 1996). The

question arises: could artefacts that can evolve and leam in conjunction with human

beings, generate skilled practices and thereby participate in human social learning? Such practices are not oily ways to gain practical outcomes, they also help create the

habitus of cultures where social relations are mediated by machines. These relations will thereby transmit technologised values and sensitivities. As well as being techno

logical adjuncts to human life, computer systems may help in creating attitudes, tastes and modes of social interaction.

The economic and social forces produced by technology, as Walter Benjamin

pointed out, produce changes in human sensitivities (Benjamin 1979). With the advent of computer technology, these changes will now appear more directly and

rapidly than ever before. The sensitivities, however, will be those of human commun ication and social relations.

Benjamin's Warning

The information society is on its way. A 'digital revolution' is triggering structural changes comparable to last century's industrial revolution with

the corresponding high economic stakes. The process cannot be stopped and will lead eventually to a knowledge-based economy.

Such techno-enthusiasm, often accompanied by colourful depictions of cybernetic wonders to cane, now fills the popular media. As the century closes, computer tech

nology is being celebrated with the visionary fervour that greeted heat engine tech

nology at the close of the nineteenth century. The speed with which information can

pass between people, around the workplace, between the governors and the governed and around the whole globe, is the latest leitmotif in the story of progress that cultures

tell themselves. In advertisements the computer screen is a sign for assured worth.

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technological excellence. High street windows display a glittering cascade of CD ROM's, computers and the means to bring together television, telephone, fax, and

Internet. The result is a system that mediates and combines education, entertainment,

work, leisure and, looking to the future, citizenship.

The quotation above, however, was not from a product brochure or

cybertechnology magazine. It was the opening section of a report to the European

Commission entitled Europe's way to the information society: an action plan

(European Commision 1994, see also Bangermann 1994). Its recommendations, in line with other recent reports were:

.... an acceleration of the liberalisation process and the achievement and

the preservation of universal service and the Internal Market principles of

free movement The deployment and financing of an information

infrastructure will be the primarily responsibility of the private sector. The tone of the report was urgent:

The race is on at global level, notably with US and Japan. Those coun

tries which will adapt themselves most readily will de facto set

technological standards for those who follow.

Computer technology is a symbol of where our culture is heading, of economic

progress, of openness and of a free market philosophy for communication and

governance. Interestingly, sensational treatments of cyberculture in popular magaz ines are often rather more modest than the technological objectives of corporations and universities. Such magazines may carry articles on sex-games in virtual reality, but it is in internal publications by the head of British Telecom's research laboratories that we find discussions of matter transference and of electronic implants for the

direct creation of pleasure (Pearson & Cochrane 1995). The economic effects of computer technology have been clear for decades now

and contribute to what Baudrillard calls the transition to an economy of signification. (Baudrillard 1993: ch.5). These promote the compression of space and time that

Harvey presents as central to the postmodern cultural condition (Harvey 1990: ch.12).

These darker surmises about the role of computer technology are a much needed

counter balance to the more upbeat celebrations by those who have a stake in what it

can do for their own community of interest. For example, Bill Gates' book on the

cultural impact of computers, 'The Way Ahead' was lauded as visionary. Now, since

he is so instrumental in building it, he quite probably sees better than most what lies ahead. However, he pays little attention to how these developments fit within wider cultural patterns. For example, in an interview in a UK newspaper published roughly at the same time, he speculated on the way the Internet might alter how ideas and

communities of interest form within society: To me, cultural homogenisation is one of the most fascinating questions. The broadcast media absolutely homogenise culture, absolutely. Take the distribution of books, some sell extremely well and then there's quite a tail-off ...the Highway is the ultimate distribution system ...more niches

will grow up, people who want to read Sanskrit or whatever. Or maybe

it'll make things more centred. It comes back to something we don't un

derstand about human interest. ... But it's not really my thing. I'm not

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willing to spend lots of time thinking about this. Just because we're in volved in building the system does not mean we know how it will be used.

Such disingenuous pursuit of technology for its own sake needs to be treated with

caution. In fact, the evidence is that the Internet, in concert with the media, enter

tainment and other aspects of screen culture, is accelerating the already rapid loss of

cultural diversity. In Europe, for example, the Internet is seen as a means for resource

transfer from the West into central European states. However, with these resources

come habits and skilled practices that have to be developed if the resources are to be

of use. These in turn render the users dependent on the corporations from which the

reources originally came. The spread of the skilled practices that go with the Internet are a form of intellectual and economic colonialism.

In somewhat the same vein, at global, national and local levels networked

systems are seen as a new resource to facilitate social and political relations.

Organising, deciding and consulting are social/political processes that are now carried out via digital technology. There are great media and political celebrations of the democratisation and openness that this will bring. Other images of cyberculture are more dystopian. In "Blade Runner" malign replicants inhabit a world of disemp owerment, corporate giganticism and squalor.

Between these two fictions, the fact is that cybernetic technology is now central to

the flow of information, resources and power that characterise late capitalism (Harvey 1990). Economic and political forces of a new sort are now, autonomously, running well beyond human control. On the more local scale, these forces manifest them

selves as non-human intelligence and communication skills. As they participate in

the arena of human social interaction they are creating the material conditions within

which human consciousness will be formed in the coming century. The technology of

the next few decades may bring the distinction between human agents and intelligent artefacts quite sharply into question. As layer after layer of interactive and responsive artefacts appear within the zone of proximal development, this distinction may become significantly more difficult and less important to make for those who develop

within this envelope created by computers and the Internet.

Although the rhetoric of the Internet is that of the exotic frontier, its reality is more urban and mundane. As Walter Benjamin foresaw, the cultural significance of

technology evolves from production and distribution to reproduction and circulation.

As this occurs, it moves human values and sensitivities towards the urban and the

erzatz. The simluacrum becomes the real and the authenticity of cultural icons is

challenged. Technological evolution now has an even more direct impact on

sociocultural learning, and the values it transmits. While technology is a cultural

product, culture is now more directly a product of technology. This loop is energised by the power structures of late capitalism. These have

passed out of human control and are leaving a destructive trace on the natural as well

as the built environment (Pickering 1996). This amplifies a condition about which Walter Benjamin warned. He observed that as the force of technology passes out of

cultural control, human relationships become mechanised. Emotional and aesthetic life too, become separated from the forms and practices which have traditionally given than meaning. As Benjamin put it: "The technique of reproduction detaches

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the reproduced object from the domain of tradition". Although here he was referring mainly to the visual arts, his analysis applies to other aspects of culture as well. For

example, in the varieties of sociocultural learning identified by Rogoff, it is becoming possible to see how many, if not all, of the roles now played by human beings could

be played by non-human agents. As technology begins both to mediate and to

participate in social practices they will become detached from the traditional domain

of human interaction. For example, the interaction from an early age with quasi human artefacts may cause children to extend to them the 'theory of mind' that is

proposed by a number of psychologists as the basis for human social interaction

(Astington et al. 1988). Benjamin noted that the celebration of violence signified that technology had

become uncontrollable, and Baudrillard's account of the Gulf War suggested that such celebration has been amplified by cybernetic circulation (Baudrillard 1991). While children play with combat videogames that incorporate clips from news broadcasts, news broadcasts about 'real' violence are often fictions, for security reasons. This characteristically postmodern confusion of the real and the simulated is now set to spread. If children develop within an envelope where social interaction with artefacts becomes the model, a more subtle violence may be done to our

capacities to interact with other human beings.

Conclusion

The incorporation of technology into human practices will accelerate and deepen as artefacts simulate basic social capacities. Human relations will be technologised to the extent that such artefacts are able to participate as agents in social interaction rather then merely to mediate it. The encounter with these artefacts will occur earlier

and earlier in human development. They will thereby take part in the sociocultural

learning by which skilled practices, and the values they express, are transmitted. The attribution of human-like agency to artefacts will change the image of both machines and of human beings.

Theories of psychology and evolution that emphasise internal cognitive or genetic mechanisms will not be much help in understanding what is going on here. Neg

lecting the cultural conditions surrounding human consciousness in order to study the

form of cognition leaves psychology at an impasse (del Rio & Alvarez 1995:229). Fortunately, both psychology and biology are shifting away from such reductionism. Both are now paying more attention to the role of action in development and in evolution. Moving beyond these restrictions makes it easier to bring these sciences

together with anthropology and ethnography. This blend of disciplines is needed to understand how technology supports thought and creates human values. Human

beings use artefacts and thereby integrate technology into their skilled practices. As

artefacts become autonomous, they may, so to speak, begin to use human beings. The

integration of technology into skilled practices will then take on a new character.

The advent of intelligent artefacts is bringing to light the neglected role of both

technology and value within the foundations of Western philosophical traditions

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(Collins 1996:3). Technology shapes the cultural conditions within which people develop their ability to live together. These conditions now include agent-like arte

facts with which human beings will need to co-exist. Given the destructiveness of

contemporary geopolitical forces, a better ethnographic understanding of the impact this will have on human social relations is urgently needed.

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