Black-Boxing Organisms, Exploiting the Unpredictable: Control Paradigms in Human–Machine Translations

Abstract

This chapter outlines the development of a new technoscientifictechnoscientific rationalityrationality in cyberneticscybernetics, artificial lifeArtificial life and especially new roboticsNew robotics. It questions the naïve assumption of some technoscientists but also social scientists and scholars from the humanities that this might be a more complex and inclusive technoscientific rationality beyond the old linear and functionalist Newtonian rationalityrationality,Newtonian. It differentiates between the development of a more static techno-rationalitytechno-rationality in mainstream cybernetics and the emergence of a more dynamic biocybernetic version in artificial life and new robotics. These technosciences introduced or partly reconfigured concepts such as communication, dis/order, noisenoise and unpredictabilityunpredictability and invented powerful analogies and methods to translate between humans and machines. With the help of this new techno-rationality, it becomes possible to ascribe specific properties onto technical systems which were traditionally reserved for human beings or organic systems. As a result, unpredictability and noise no more function as potential remedies against technoscientific controlcontrol strategies but as new, more flexible and versatile means of command and control to make the translation of human and machine more effective.