Seeing threats, sensing flesh: human-machine ensembles at work

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articlepeer-review

  • Perle Møhl
Based on detailed descriptions of human–machine ensembles, this article explores how humans and machines work together to see specific things and unsee others, and how they come to co-configure one another. For seeing is not an automated function; whether one is a human or a machine, vision is gradually enskilled and mutually co-constituted. The analysis intersects three different ways of human–machine seeing to shed further light on the workings of each one: an airport, where facial recognition algorithms collaborate with border guards to grant passage to particular travellers and not to others; a luggage-scanning system, where potential security threats are assessed by a complex of X-rays and human intro-spection; and a hospital operating room, where human–machinic surgical robots find their way and operate on the insides of human bodies, touching only by seeing. In these examples, human and machine ways of seeing merge together, seeing in particular apparatuses of material, political, organisational, economic and fleshy components. The article analyses the practical work of human–machinic collaboration and explores how the different material and social constituents, not necessarily always working from the same agenda, come to configure what can be seen and sensed and what cannot.
Original languageEnglish
JournalAI & Society: Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Communication
Volume36
Pages (from-to)1243–1252
Number of pages20
ISSN0951-5666
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2021

    Research areas

  • Faculty of Social Sciences - Human–machine interfaces, Visual enskillment, Sensory anthropology, Facial recognition, X-ray scanning, Robotic surgery

ID: 239313187