AI's desire

At the Artificial Intelligence Conference in New York, Kathryn Hume pointed me to Ellen Ullman's excellent book, Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology. In Part 3 of her book "Life, Artificial," Ullman talks about artificial intelligence, robotics, and the desire to create artificial life. What these views of human sentience have in common, and why they fail to describe us, is a certain disdain for the body: the utter lack of a body in early AI and in later formulations like Kurzweil's (the lonely cortex, scanned and downloaded, a brain-in-a-jar); and the disregard for this body, this mammalian flesh, in robotics and ALife [Artificial Life]. By connecting the poverty of AI with its denial of the body, Ullman follows an important thread in feminist theory: our thinking needs to be connected to bodies, to physical human process, to blood and meat. The male-dominated Western tradition is all about abstraction, for which Plato is the poster child.