The paper is about AI in the 80's/90's, but it still rings true in 2025 and, to my reading, goes a long way toward illuminating the mindsets of the master-of-the-universe types who are wrecking so many things in the name of technical progress.
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But the answer isn't to just stop doing tech! Agre concludes: "A critical technical practice will, at least for the foreseeable future, require a split identity -- one foot planted in the craft work of design and the other foot planted in the reflexive work of critique."
Wow, I'd totally forgotten that this execellent paper was about AI! When I last read it, AI was more or less dead, at least under the 'AI' label, so I didn't pay attention to it. Now that AI is undead, it's going to be a different kind of read!
The symbolic logic AI in Agre's writing differs in many technical ways with 2020s deep learning, so it's surprising how on-the-mark the critique still reads. There's still the same deliberate vagueness in how the world gets distilled into symbols and representations to begin with.
But Agre's points aren't always limited to AI. I riff a bit on this in the context of mappings for DMIs in my recent JNMR paper -- §3.1, which also draws on some work by @thormagnusson.bsky.social and @adamlinson.bsky.social. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/09298215.2024.2442356
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https://orpheusinstituut.be/en/publications/sound-work