Contentious Others: Logo and Dilemmas of Difference in the US, Britain, and France
Abstract: Recent historiography suggests that social and ethical concerns have long been central to AI research. This paper traces ambitions to develop socially responsible AI in the history of the Logo computer programme between the late 1960s and early 1990s in the US, the UK, and France. The main inspirations for Logo were Jean Piaget’s developmental psychology and Marvin Minsky’s decentralised theory of intelligence. For designers and educators, the hope was that Logo would enable the flourishing of a diversity of learning and programming styles, thereby undermining the dominant culture within computer science. I suggest that distinct national imaginaries shaped understandings of the programme’s political and epistemological possibilities across the three cases. Logo was developed at MIT’s AI lab as part of a libertarian, anti-authoritarian education project, later recast as a tool to undermine patriarchy. In France, it was accommodated with republican ideals and welcomed as a first step in developing ‘informatology’, the study of people and computers across cultural differences. At Edinburgh, researchers emphasised the structural making of difference (esp. along gender lines) that limited the programme’s alleged revolutionary potential. This paper bridges AI historiography and the history of feminist thought. Studying how imaginaries of nationhood, debates about the aims and nature of AI, and conceptions of justice and otherness contributed to shaping distinct and partly contradictory ideals of computer emancipation in various national contexts, it helps to complexify AI historiography but also to recover alternative conceptualisations of moral development and subject configurations for current AI ethics.
Author bio: Apolline Taillandier is a postdoctoral research associate at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence and POLIS at the University of Cambridge, and the Center for Science and Thought at the University of Bonn. Apolline studied political theory at Sciences Po in Paris before joining the Max Planck Sciences Po Center on Coping with Instability in Market Societies, where she wrote her dissertation under the supervision of Prof. Jenny Andersson. During her PhD, she studied the history of contemporary transhumanism as articulating a set of projects about liberalism’s future. She was a Fulbright student researcher at the University of California, Berkeley Sociology Department in 2018 and a Cambridge Sciences Po visiting student in POLIS in 2019. In her postdoctoral research, she investigates the historical role of feminist thought and activism in the critique of computer technology and the remaking of artificial intelligence as a scientific project from the 1980s onwards. In the context of rising concerns about the discriminatory and stratifying effects of AI, she studies the transnational circulation of ethics and gender justice norms and their reinterpretation and appropriation by scientists and industry actors, focusing on European and U.S. American sites of technical AI research.
Recorded Presentation | 26 April 2023
#History #FeministApproaches #US #UK #France
