Speculative machines and us: more-than-human intuition and the algorithmic condition

ABSTRACT

In the wake of Turing’s ‘universal machine’, this article foregrounds intuition as a generative concept and lens to unfold the affective genealogies of human-machine relations in post-war transatlantic cultures. As a mode of sensing, knowing, anticipating, and navigating the world that exceeds rational analysis, intuition is, I will argue, vital to attuning to our contemporary ‘algorithmic condition’, in which machine learning technologies are actively re-distributing cognition across humans and machines, transforming the nature of (in)human experience, and rearticulating questions of cultural value and desire. The article focuses on three key historical moments which enable us to retrospectively glimpse an emerging condensation of interest and urgency concerning our changing relationships with ‘new’ technologies in Britain and North America – 1) 1950s: The birth of AI and cybernetics; 2) 1980s: The rise of the personal computer and software cultures and; 3) 2010s: Inhabiting algorithmic life. In each period, particular aspects of intuition surface as significant in animating our affective and cultural entanglements with computational technologies. While intuition has gained affective traction at particular historical junctures as both what essentially defines ‘the human’ and what has become essentially inhuman, I argue that addressing the sensorial, socio-political, cultural, and ethical issues current machine learning architectures open up requires attuning to immanent human-algorithmic entanglements and the techno-social ecologies they inhabit and recursively reshape.

KEYWORDS:

• Affect
• Alan Turing
• algorithm
• cybernetics
• intuition
• post-war genealogy

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Leverhulme Trust under grant RF-2020-005\8: ‘Digital Media and the Human: The Social Life of Software, AI and Algorithms’. Excellent research assistance by Sophie Rowlands and Ames Clark was fundamental to this project. Many thanks to the Editors and the anonymous reviewers for their incisive feedback on the article, which improved this piece in significant ways. My gratitude also goes to Greg Seigworth, Beckie Coleman, and Dawn Lyon for their valuable insight and encouragement throughout this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See account in Hodges, 1983.

2 See Sampson (forthcoming) for an insightful discussion of important differences within media studies, STS, new materialisms, and speculative philosophy with respect to how, exactly, a collective ‘cognitive nonconscious’ is conceptualized.

3 See Suchman, 2011, 2019; Clough, 2018; Parisi and Dixon-Romàn, 2020; Chun, 2021.

4 See, for example, Hodges, 1983.

5 On algorithmic (infra)structures of feeling see Coleman, 2017; Bucher, 2017, 2018.

6 We might, of course, note the partial resonance here with Walter Benjamin’s ‘angel of history’.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by The Leverhulme Research Fellowship, RF-2020-005\8: ‘Digital Media and the Human: The Social Life of Software, AI and Algorithms'.

Notes on contributors

Carolyn Pedwell

Carolyn Pedwell is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Kent. She is the author of three monographs, Revolutionary Routines: The Habits of Social Transformation (McGill-Queens UP, 2021), Affective Relations: The Transnational Politics of Empathy (Palgrave, 2014), and Feminism, Culture and Embodied Practice (Routledge, 2010). Carolyn is also co-editor (with Gregory J. Seigworth) of The Affect Theory Reader II: Worldings, Tensions, Futures (Duke UP, 2023).