Frontiers in Future Transportation

Gerner A.M., Breyer T., Grouls N., Schick J.F.

This book opens up an interdisciplinary arena of research, contoured by the terms “gestures” and “artefacts,” and is oriented by a diachronic perspective on technology. In the context of anthropology, artefacts and gestures are both essential to understanding human culture and behavior. They are interconnected features that reveal numerous facets of a culture’s ideas, values, social institutions, and communication methods. In a general sense, artefacts are the material entities created, utilized, or altered by humans within a particular cultural context. These can range from implements, clothing, and utensils to works of art, structures, and technological equipment. Artefacts are physical manifestations of human ingenuity, desires, and beliefs. Anthropologists examine them to learn about a culture’s technology, economic systems, creative expressions, and daily behaviors. Artefact analysis can show a society’s level of development, social organization, and cultural standards. Gestures on the other hand are typically conceived as non-verbal means of communication consisting of body motions, facial expressions, and hand signs. Nonverbal cues are fundamental to human contact and communication. Emotions, intentions, attitudes, and cultural meanings can be communicated through gestures. Different societies have distinct gesture systems with specific connotations. Anthropologists investigate gestures in order to comprehend how people communicate nonverbally and how cultural norms and social settings influence nonverbal communication. The relationship between artefacts and gestures resides in their potential to offer complimentary insights onto a society. While artefacts reflect how humans engage with their physical environment and produce tangible representations of their culture, gestures disclose the more subtle aspects of human communication and social interaction. Together, these components assist anthropologists construct a comprehensive picture of a culture’s lifestyle, beliefs, and behaviors. In ritualistic performances, for instance, a specific artefact such as a ceremonial mask may be utilized alongside certain motions that show reverence or respect. By examining the mask as an artefact and evaluating the accompanying motions, anthropologists can comprehend the object’s cultural importance and the embodied communication that occurs throughout the ritual.

Iliopoulos A., Malafouris L.

Despite the ‘embodied’ turn that gesture studies have been taking, the extent to which the body actually contributes to the realization of thought remains questionable. Due, in large part, to the preoccupation of ‘embodied cognitivism’ with co-verbal gestures, the material world and the gestures engaging it are usually left out of discussion. That said, there is a small but growing corpus of literature on the cognitive effects of gesture that seeks to account for the performative role of the body, as well as the scaffolding function of the physical world. The purpose of this book chapter is to outline the arguments presented by the main representatives of what we loosely call here ‘ecological’ approaches. Our goal for doing so is two-fold: i) to highlight the important insights gained about gesture through an ecological lens, and ii) to identify promising lines of inquiry for future research. What we identify as an approach suitably geared towards studying gesture, and especially its creative variety, is a theoretical framework grounded on the combination of Material Engagement Theory and Peircean semiotics.

Aguiar V.D.

Based on recent developments in the mathematical theory of music, philosophy of mathematics, and gesture studies, this paper builds a pragmaticist (Peirce) philosophical framework within which musical composition can be analyzed without reducing it to “abstract formulas” or “inspiration”. At least two widespread types of artifacts that mediate the compositional process rely on gestural techniques, namely, musical instruments and notations. Notwithstanding, the creative dialectics between gestures and sounds, mediated by artifacts, became the target of in-depth investigation in musicology only in recent decades (Mazzola). And the creative potentialities of musical notations still nowadays tend to be tackled by considering only the strategies of visualization that they afford (Krämer), leaving aside the manu-facture and manu-tension of the diagrammatic (Alunni) — already identified, however, in the philosophy of science and mathematics (Châtelet). We will show how a diachronic perspective on those gestural techniques can reveal an interesting role of the body in the opening up of musical “programs” to dissonances and noises. Far from being the outcome of “intellectual” decisions, new musical continents have been (re-)searched and cultivated through specific modalities of gestures, that we will try to uncover and systematize.

Schick J.F.

This chapter develops the potential of a literal understanding of technology (as logos of techné), to develop an interdisciplinary anthropology. Technology in this sense draws together the diachronic aspect that is implied in the central hypothesis of French techno-anthropology that every technical object contains a crystallized human gesture and the systematic aim to understand human beings in the digital age. To outline the heuristic of technology as interdisciplinary anthropology I will focus on the ontological and epistemological presuppositions of socio-technical practices, technical objects, and the gestures involved. They produce difference and are transformative. Gestures are thus not conceived as bodily actions in a narrow sense but comprise also mental operations. Accordingly, gestures can be crystallized in stone axes as well as in computers. This diachronic approach to technologies allows to understand multiple modes of being human that the human entanglement with technical objects and networks provides.

Pieters C.

A precise definition of ‘gesture’ is not essential in order to observe that the word carries a form of human embodied expression. Thus, when extending this word to artifacts like robots, its application raises some questions in terms of ambiguity. Why do we use words typically reserved for the living when referring to artefacts?  Usually, the state-of-the-art dives into this matter via a socio-cognitive perspective. It is about investigating how robots impact human perception by observing how the human brain tends to attribute intentions to moving and shape-alike objects. This approach presents the agentive language as an effect and describes how we come to talk about robots as wanting to go right or left, making decisions, being intelligent, autonomous, etc. In this paper, I propose a reversal of this approach, examining the connection between the perception of movement and natural language from a linguistic perspective; I discuss what – within language itself – can eventually explain the specific way in which humans translate their perception of movement into words. Firstly, I review some of the general principles that describe the influence of language on cognition with the ambition to highlight the relevance of adopting a linguistic approach to the issue. Then, I support the idea that movement raises a problem of ineffability (i.e. that motion resists linguistic coding). I show how this problem constraints the programming of moving machines and I argue that this linguistic matter has an impact on our common way of thinking and talking about the artefacts that we call ‘robots’.

Morgenstern A., Boutet D.

Despite de Saussure’s (1959) visionary writings as to the importance of parole (speech) as well as langue (the language system), the linguistics he founded have focused on the system rather than on use. As a result, language has long been studied out of its ecological context, first through written forms characterized by their linearity, then through invented sentences, and finally with a focus on speech, in experimental studies or semi-guided interactions. Even when gestures are integrated into the analyses, environments are most often stripped of objects or other activities whose affordances have a multitude of impacts on their use. Those limits can be viewed as strengths as they have conducted to fruitful research on langue. However, we believe that in order to capture the full complexity of language, new approaches are needed in which all our semiotic resources can be analyzed as they are deployed in their natural habitat involving the orchestration of bodies engaged in a variety of situated activities with a diversity of artifacts. In this paper, we will focus on the use of “manipulative” and “communicative” gestures in an ecological environment. We will first present some of the biases, categorizations, and possible continuities in past analyses of gestures, introduce our theoretical framework and methods and illustrate our approach through detailed analyses of a sequence of video extracts to capture the coordination of speech, gesture, and actions of family members as they are eating and conversing during their daily dinner.

Vermaas P.

This chapter explores the question of whether robots can make gestures that can be described as related to the intentionality of the robots themselves and not to the intentionality of their designers. For this exploration, robots are approached as entities designed by humans. Dennett’s stance framework is adopted for analysing descriptions of robot gestures and this framework is generalised to one in which not only single stances can be used to describe robots, but also pair of stances where one is applied to the robot and one to its designers. Conclusions are that Dennett’s framework warrants descriptions of robot gestures in terms of robot intentionality and does more often so as compared to more fundamental approaches to agency in which it should be first determined that robots have agency. Yet, in the case of robots displaying unexcepted gestures, more fundamental approaches may warrant descriptions of robot gestures in terms of robot intentionality that cannot be adopted on Dennett’s approach.

Richter J., Breyer T.

Prehistoric stone tools allow for detailed insights into patterns of movements of the human body and the mobility of individuals and groups. As contextualized at the beginning of this chapter, such a behavioural perspective is rooted in so-called “Processual Archaeology”, which we imply as the starting point of our approach, devoted to deciphering vernacular choreographies casting the everyday life of early humans. Here, we use settlement locales on the Crimea peninsula in order to describe three scales of human mobility. All sites were occupied by the last Neanderthal humans, about 45,000 years ago. At a small scale, we reconstruct recipes of stone tool production with gestures of human arms, hands, and fingers, all within the kinesphere or kinaesthetic bodily space of an individual Neanderthal. The embodied performances of knapping are considered “body techniques” in the sense of Marcel Mauss. Two more scales are then dealt with in lesser detail: at an intermediate scale, a small campsite is considered as a choreographic “stage” for movements of the human body, walking, standing, and sitting down, all related to disassembling three animals hunted nearby and brought to the dwelling place. At a large scale, we compare a cluster of settlement sites that supposedly belonged to the same, seasonally geared mobility system, thus describing an annual itinerary of humans through their landscape. As a result, we envisage the option of understanding artefacts and objects as expressions of an ancient practice, geared by vernacular choreography.

Maddalena G.

Western philosophy often overlooked the problem of technology. It is a long-standing prejudice of a nominalist or idealist mentality that goes on from ancient Greece up to today. Compared to other contemporary currents of thought, the pragmatist tradition had some interesting ideas because it united in a profound continuum theory and practice, overthrowing any dualism. This move was particularly effective in Peirce’s studies on continuity, logical modalities, logic of abduction, and existential graphs as well as in Dewey’s approach to logic as an integrated tool of inquiry in which technology is part of the human organism. However, also the pragmatist tradition remained somehow only with a good analysis of synthesis and a good theory of practice but did not complete its drive toward a different vision of syntheticity and technology. The philosophy of gesture that I will propose in this paper wants to complete the unfinished work of this tradition relying heavily on pragmatist phenomenology and semiotics. In the first part, I will sum up the main structure of this philosophy of gesture, as I name it (I). In the second part, I will show the fundamental application of this philosophy to technology (II). At the end, I will illustrate an application for blind people to see a museum that is inspired by the Philosophy of gesture (III).

Gerner A.M.

Arte(f)actors are artefacts that mimic to be actors. Can artifacts play or mimic playing with human actors, or are they necessarily staged in technological as-if dramaturgies? What role do gesture play in arte(f)actors? How can playing with and staging games with artefactors render visible the relations of co-embodiments between animate and artificial players in games we play with artefactors as play media that entail artifacts and AI systems mimicking to be actors and that, in turn, play with us? The play and mimesis philosophy must be heeded, especially Roger Caillois extended the idea of play and mimetism to comprehend android artifacts and human-AI dramaturgies on technological stages.

Parviainen J., Coeckelbergh M.

Controversy arose when a humanoid robot named “Sophia” was given citizenship and did performances all over the world. Why should some robots gain citizenship? Going beyond recent discussions in robot ethics and human–robot interaction, and drawing on phenomenological approaches to political philosophy, actor-network theory, and performance-oriented philosophy of technology, we propose to interpret and discuss the world tour of Sophia as a political choreography: we argue that the media performances of the Sophia robot were politically choreographed to advance economic interests. Using a phenomenological approach and attending to the performance and movement of robots and illustrating our discussion with media material of the Sophia performance, we explore the mechanisms through which the media spectacle and robotic performance advanced the economic interests of technology industries and their governmental promotors.

Kwan K.

The sex robots are coming, and this has generated a debate between the supporters and critics of sex with sex robots. David Levy is an enthusiastic advocate for sex with sexbot, but his sex robot utopianism is contradicted by severe criticisms of the use of sexbots by radical feminists like Kathleen Richardson and personalist critics like Michael Hauskeller. In this article, I will explore Levy’s intriguing arguments in some details, and then provide also a detailed critique of his arguments. My conclusion is that sex with sex robots is fraught with many problems and a kind of sex robot utopianism is unwarranted.

Yeung F.S., Song F.

Existing approaches to machine ethics harbor an unquestioned commitment to the development of ethical machines and an unreflective optimism that ethical principles can be executable by machines. The first part of this paper raises two challenges to such dogmas: the hypocrisy challenge and the disagreement challenge. The first challenge is that, aside from finding the right machine ethics program, machine ethicists must consider whether their development of such machines is consistent with the precepts of their adopted ethical theory. The second challenge concerns whether the focus on particular ethical theories (especially rationalist and codifiable ones) in the field of machine ethics involves a biased representation of ethical traditions that contradicts commitments to inclusion and pluralism. In the second part of the paper, we offer a possible candidate for machine ethics we call the “skillful-expert model.” This model is based on the assumption that, for machines that have well-defined functions, the requirement of ethical goodness is equivalent to the requirement of skillful performance. We argue that this model has strong support from the neglected, virtue-ethical and phenomenological traditions of ethics, and sidesteps the major challenges raised in the first part.

Wong P.

The term ‘trustworthy AI’ has become one of the keywords in the academic and policy discussion of the social, ethical, and legal issues of artificial intelligence (AI), but it remains a contested notion and there are open debates about its meaning and how it is to be operationalized. For philosophers and ethicists, the debate has particularly revolved around the meaning of ‘trust’ and ‘trustworthiness’. However, since a thin and acultural understanding of trust and trustworthiness has been common in the debate, the notion of trustworthy AI is at best ambiguous in a global and cross-cultural context, where trust and trustworthiness can be interpreted differently. A culturally-sensitive exploration of trust, trustworthiness, and trustworthy AI is, therefore, much needed to gain insights on what and how trustworthy AI can be conceptualised through the normative resources of other cultural traditions. This article attempts to offer a culturally sensitive exploration of trustworthy AI by drawing on recent analysis of trust and trustworthiness in Confucian philosophy. More specifically, I shall demonstrate how taking seriously the Confucian view of trust and trustworthiness in the context of AI provides us an alternative way to think about the ethics and governance of AI

Hao K., Checketts L.

Karen Hao is an investigative technology journalist who previously worked for MIT Tech Review and The Wall Street Journal. Her work investigates many of the hidden aspects of technology, including its environmental and human costs. In this interview, she talks about the work she conducted in Colombia and Kenya with people doing data tagging and filtering for generative AI. She articulates a human side to work that is typically faceless and nameless, and highlights the global interconnection inherent in AI work. While the trauma and desperation that accompanies ghost work is dispiriting, Ms. Hao provides a hopeful vision of dignified work and the hope for truly humane AI.