Extended Intelligence: Awareness-Based Interventions into the Ecology of Autonomous and Intelligent Systems

Abstract

This dissertation represents a multi-layered discourse analysis of the ethics and governance of artificial intelligence that observes the shifting baselines between agent- based and system-based approaches which continue to both constitute and challenge the essentially contested notion of ‘AI.’ Recognizing that these approaches have always marked the different pathways of artificial intelligence since the field’s beginnings between the Macy’s Conferences on Cybernetics and the Dartmouth Workshop, the work reckons with the process-oriented ontology of technology based on which sociotechnical imaginaries materialize through posthuman modes of becoming in institutionalized actor- networks. Therefore, awareness-based interventions into the ecology of autonomous and intelligent systems involve a reverse-engineering of the institutional infrastructures that draw and reinforce epistemic boundaries around singularities of disciplined knowledge based on which intersubjective beliefs are restructured and synchronized towards a ‘hyperfuture.’ Ultimately, this work is positioned as a speculation about new research infrastructures that render engagement with artificial intelligence more complex, more multi-directional, more contested, more liberated, and more “messy.”