Episode 127: Leaving the Mechanical Dollhouse: On Abeba Birhane's "The Impossibility of Automating Ambiguity"

Weird Studies

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel

Society & Culture, Arts, Philosophy

4.8 • 688 Ratings

🗓️ 6 July 2022

⏱️ 77 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Like Caligula declaring war on Neptune and ordering his troops to charge into the Mediterranean Sea, our technological masters are designing neural networks meant to capture the human soul in all its oceanic complexity. According to the cognitive scientist Abeba Birhane, this is a fool's errand that we undertake at our peril. In her paper "The Impossibility of Automating Ambiguity," she makes the case for the irremediable fluidity, spontaneity, and relationality of people and societies. She argues that ongoing efforts to subsume the human (and the rest of reality) in predictive algorithms is actually narrowing the human experience, as so many of us are excluded from the system while others are compelled to artificially conform to its idea of the human. Far from paving the way to a better world, the tyranny of automation threatens to cut us off from the Real, ensuring an endless perpetuation of the past with all its errors and injustices. Phil and JF discuss Birhane's essay in this episode. Header image from via www.vpnsrus.com (cropped). Downloaded from Wikimedia Commons. Listen to volume 1 and volume 2 of the Weird Studies soundtrack by Pierre-Yves Martel Support us on Patreon Find us on Discord Get the new T-shirt design from Cotton Bureau! Get your Weird Studies merchandise (t-shirts, coffee mugs, etc.) Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop REFERENCES Abebe Birhane, "The Impossibility of Automating Ambiguity” J. F. Martel, “Reality is Analog: Philosophizing with Stranger Things” Melissa Adler, Cruising the Library: Perversities in the Organization of Knowledge Weird Studies, Episode 75 on 2001: A Space Odyssey Weird Studies, Episode 114 on the Wheel of Fortune William James, American philosopher Midjourney, AI art generator Rhine Research Center, parapsychology lab George Lewis, “Improvised Music after 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives” Abebe Birhane, “Descartes was Wrong: A Person is a Person Through Other Persons” Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, German philosopher J. R. R. Tolkein, “On Fairy-Stories” Martin Buber, I and Thou Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Spectrevision Radio
0:03.3	Welcome to Weird Studies, an arts and philosophy podcast with hosts Phil Ford and J.F. Martel.
0:23.3	For more episodes or to support the podcast, go to weird studies.
0:52.0	This is Phil.
0:53.8	If you're thinking of bailing on listening to an hour and change podcast on an academic article,
1:00.1	stop right there. You, with your finger hovering over your phone screen,
1:04.9	checking to see if there's anything more happening out there in Podcastville.
1:09.9	Cool it down a little. Sometimes you got to slow down.
1:13.9	That's why we like reading works from professional academics from time to time.
1:18.5	The academic mode is slow. A lot of time is wound up in even the briefest academic article.
1:25.4	Time spent in the library or in the field or hunched at a desk
1:28.5	sweating out one duly weighted word after another. Sure, it isn't always fun to read academic prose,
1:36.1	but every now and then, you're surprised by some piece of writing that adds a certain gracefulness
1:41.1	to the often Saturnian products of the scholars' hard-grinding search.
1:46.7	I'm thinking of the episodes we've done on Lisa Ruddick's When Nothing is Cool, Episode 5,
1:52.3	Joshua Ramey's Contingency Without Unreason, Episode 22, and Martha Feldman's The Castrato,
1:59.9	Episode 72.
2:02.0	And this week we have turned up another stylish piece of work,
2:05.7	Abebe Birhanes the impossibility of automating ambiguity.
2:10.4	We are not the Cartesian selves we still halfway believe we are, Berhani argues.
2:16.7	The truth of the human is not to be found in some
2:19.3	isolate condition, once all extraneous variables, i.e. other people, have been removed. Rather,
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Phil Ford and J. F. Martel, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Phil Ford and J. F. Martel and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.