An Anthropology of Cyborgs, for Cyborgs – San Francisco 2025

so hello my name is Amber case and I'm going to talk with you about an anthropology of cyborgs for cyborgs and usually I have everyone stand up and show their phones and then tell them how cyborg they are but today we'll start a little bit differently I don't know how many people have uh know about this type of it's like stochastic gradient descent but what's really important is that sometimes when you're searching for a solution especially when it's new technology you might go over to that little indent and say we found the solution it's AR it's VR because that's what we've been told in a magazine or that's what we've been told in our social groups that's the solution that's where we should be participating it's this specific shape of AI it's this way of collaborating with each other but in reality if we stop there and we stop exploring we miss this one over here yeah have a laser pointer this over here we miss if we don't walk around and look at what's going on and the question is how do we better walk around and what and look at what's going on and this is this is a hard thing and if you add more Dimensions to your search if you add more Dimensions to your context and your metacognition around a space you might be able to find more than you thought and I want to go over a couple of different ways that I find is an interesting way of doing this so uh one of my favorite people Ward Cunningham I always like to ask him how do you think the way you do and he's known for Cunningham's law the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question it's to post the wrong answer now this is great because one of the ways that you can do that is just just go and post something that you know is incorrect but it might get you closer to what the real thing is the other thing that I noticed about programmers is that very few people look at asking questions because I think programming is very often about being declarative you want to tell the computer what to do exactly what to do you want to be extremely precise and when I did so much mathematics it was it was about this Precision it was about having these answers but I noticed that there's a whole group of people who actually can get around this space really really fast faster than most people I've seen and that's artists because artists add more dimensionality to the space don't necessarily limit themselves to a specific uh subject matter and also they are asking questions and oftentimes they're looking at the right question to ask and I love this quote from James Baldwin the purpose of Art is to lay be the questions that have been hidden by the answers and I think a lot of times the answers stand in the way of as asking where something came from and whether we should be going down this path and resting or if we should consider to keep on exploring and find that Global Minima instead of the local Minima so one of the question questions that I like to ask of anything is when we throw a term around where does it come from how many people know where the term artificial intelligence came from yay and how many people have thought of asking this question it's it was very difficult to actually get an answer there were a few people that talked about this online and here's here's the story that I got out which is norber reer was talking about cybernetics and early on cybernetics was about control systems and feedback loops and keeping humans in the loop and it was very oriented from a group of people that were very I don't want to say blue collar but it was like non-abstract people who were setting up factories and setting up systems people who are doing electrical engineering and running simulation models and working with things that they knew were dangerous the problem uh with this person is that he talked a lot and he would go to meetups and he would say well that's cybernetics that's cybernetics what you're talking about is definitely cybernetics and it was starting to annoy people a lot of people really wanted to hang out and not have this person just take up all of the the voice in the room and the term cybernetics is from the Greek which is about Helm's person it's someone who's steering a ship if we think about it it's not some it's not some system automatically doing everything for you it's about having a bunch of automated systems on a ship or in a car doing things for you but you're the person steering the human is getting lots and lots of information putting that into system type two thinking so they can do other things and they're making decisions based on that so there's always a person getting the information making decision and how those systems are designed and if they're designed well that makes all the difference so what happened was that uh McCarthy and others created this term artificial intelligence he says one reason for inventing the term AI was to escape association with cybernetics I wish to avoid having either to accept norber weiner as a guru or having to argue with him so they got together and they made this conference they said hey Dartmouth can we have a little Summer Conference on artificial intelligence and if you look there's some massive luminaries here very playful people that played around with questions Claude Shannon most notably getting asked questions why is there noise in this signal in telephones and through figuring out why ended up creating all sorts of interesting Innovations through the interesting questions that were asked at Bells here's a little plaque up in 1956 at Dartmouth and here's everyone so happy that they don't have to have Norbert weiner in the room talking all over them but the problem with this is that the term artificial intelligence every single piece of text that we have has specific Aesthetics associated with it and the Aesthetics of artificial intelligence were different than cybernetics and they're so exciting to journalists that we started to have Two Worlds one world was the fear and the excitement and the other world was okay we're doing automation based on basic principles let's see how we can do this well and let's let's integrate all of the engineering principles that we've had as a Continuum into this system well that is cybernetics and then here is something that people can post about on LinkedIn and not entirely get right but look like they're being an expert and of course the first chatbot Eliza which is the foundation for how we interact with a lot of these these chat systems today came out in 1960 um by Joseph weisen bomb who was making fun of the idea uh sorry 1966 um but he was making fun of the idea that oh yes you can definitely automate therapy let me just make the most stereotypical therapist as an Automation and then found that his secretary loved using this bot not because it was perfect but it got her in a cybernetic feedback loop with herself so that she could have a meta cognition about how she was experiencing the world later on he thought everyone was confusing these Bots for real people when in reality no one was they just founded an interesting tool for metacognition in the same way that you might throw the iching or use tarot cards or talk with someone through your problems it's still all cybernetics and then of course there was the takeoff and the the crashes and the boo the booms in the bus um but in 1900 when The Wizard of Oz came out it was all about this fear of automation the industrial man does he have a heart the Scarecrow is the farmer does he have a brain can we transition into this new reality we have Dorothy on the gold standard of the time walking through trying to figure out how is she going to grow up in a world that's transitioning from an ining Society to an automated one in which we have humans using tools alongside each other farming to humans using tools to use other human beings through factories and automation so when I talk about science fiction versus reality we have a lot of people who might watch a movie called Minority Report and think that the future will be hands- based interaction systems if you were to work at the equivalent of the DMV all day with your hands going like this to do information you would be very exhausted or you would have mega muscles when in reality the best type of interfaces are passed through interfaces when Google first came out people tried to scroll down the page because they thought there was content but now people use it kind of like a calculator you focus on the task and not the tool and the tool dissolves with use and we pass through how we Design Systems is governance and if we design them in a way in which they are not passed through and people focus on the tool and not the task we end up giving people complete headaches all the time and kind of Dos attacking their attention we have things that look really really good in advertising like this infinite car display mockup and we have things that just work where you can have a conversation with someone else and you don't have to worry about going through a touch screen to turn on the the window windshield wipers and having the system update stop you from being able to use your car one was sold based on how it looks the other one was evolved based on how it felt to use so I think we're in this weird trajectory where we're in this local minimum to say that touch screens and blue lights and all these things should be done and these specific type of interfaces but we're not voting on them based on how they feel to use like a light switch that you don't actually notice unless you need to use it I feel like in these type of times there is a danger times when telling stories about doing the real thing are more rewarded than actually doing the real thing and that a lot of people can't tell the difference between a story about someone doing a real thing with someone with Charisma and the real thing that's quite hard to do and this is happening across user experience artificial intelligence things like AR and VR because people aren't asking the questions of where things came from we've divorced history from it and we're not being playful around running around the landscape to see if we're stuck in a local minimum there's this field of cognitive security that I think is really interesting but I feel like all of us has a responsibility to understand our own local Minima and how we adopt an understanding of our world world and whether we should be asking the questions or not about how we should be going about things and to ask are we doing this out of fear because everybody told us this is the thing we need to do or are we actually asking questions about what we could be doing so when we talk about humans alongside technology there's a cybernetic Loop but there's also the idea of oops if if you look at any tool that works alongside culture like this machine that helps pound oops this machine that helps pound of gravel so that people can make absolutely beautiful pottery and then that set of practices and tools and cultures is handed down from generation and generation this is basically a calm technology you can actually see it and hear it and understand it it's legible to everybody but it's working alongside a culture at group scale not just human scale I can't go too much further I have so many more slides because we're running late on time and I want to make sure everybody has more time but I have a more a lot more stuff online which I can tell you about and I'll just give you a brief overview if you want to read more in the 90s the these two researchers um and one of them was Mark Weiser talked about the idea that technology would one day be very cheap and at that point the most scarce resource in the world wouldn't be Tech it would be our attention and how technology worked with or against our attention would make or break the future of technology and I think that's one of the biggest things if we think about a cognitive security perspective the way that we build our tools we're not taking attention into account we're making things that look a certain way but we don't understand if you're doing anything from governance to voting to signing up for an event sitting down choosing something it's not necessarily that something should be easy to use the first time but it should be easy to use once you get used to it it takes a long time to learn how to drive a car or to ride a bike but once we're used to it we never have to learn it again think about some sort of CRM that changes every week and if you go away from it for a couple of months you have to relearn it again all of the things that you want to do with it you're prevented from doing so I've started this thing called the the calm Tech Institute where it's a series of guidelines to actually rink quantitatively how much attention something takes to use how much attention something takes to support and has a bunch of principles that bring back original engineering that we have we have kind of lost and original design principles that are more rooted in the past ideally at least 12200 years of history is trying to go into this where it's a Continuum so that we can build tools and rate them in a way that actually Mak sense to us at human scale um because I think this Continuum isn't there anymore we think of Technology over here and we think of tools here it's actually part of the same system and I think when we're doing automated systems and Ai and mechanical engineering as long as we're doing the analog first then our minds are in a good shape to do the next steps but if we stop teaching oursel these things then we lose out and we end up in the abstract science fiction space that ends up making beautiful things that are very difficult to use thank you so much [Music]