The psychic structure of disciplinary imperialism
From Sherry Turkle’s classic The Second Self pg 229-230:
The first justification for AI’s invasions and colonization of other disciplines’ intellectual turf was a logic of necessity. The excursions into psychology and linguistics began as raids to acquire ideas that might be useful for building thinking machines. But the politics of “colonization” soon takes on a life of its own. The invaders come not only to carry off natural resources but to replace native “superstitions” with their “superior” world view. AI first declared the need for psychological theories that would work on machines. The next step was to see these alternatives as better—better because they can be “implemented,” better because they are more “scientific.” Being in a colonizing discipline first demands and then encourages an attitude that might be called intellectual hubris. You need intellectual principles that are universal enough to give you the feeling that you have something to say about everything. The AI community had this in their idea of program. Furthermore, since you cannot master all the disciplines that you have designs on, you need confidence that your knowledge makes the “traditional wisdom” of these fields unworthy of serious consideration. Here too, the AI scientist feels that seeing things through a computational prism so fundamentally changes the rules of every game in the social and behavioral sciences that everything that came before is relegated to a period of intellectual immaturity. And finally you have to feel that nothing is beyond your intellectual reach if you are smart enough.
See also the hostility of digital elites towards expertise.
#dataScience #digitalElites #disciplines #domainExpertise #epistemicHeirarchy #intellectualLabour #intellectualLife #work
Yayaver
Mark Carrigan
John Griogair Bell
