{ "docId": "019dd923-5e88-73ef-bd59-dddef82be3b0", "docSlug": "b5722f8c12c21bf3", "documentTitle": "The importance of being human in a digital world", "authorId": "Deloitte", "authorName": "Cambridge University Press", "documentKindSlug": "consulting-deck", "documentKindLabel": "Consulting deck", "sourceTypeSlug": "strategy_consulting", "sourceTypeLabel": "Strategy consulting", "presentationDate": null, "orientation": "portrait", "aspectRatio": 0.667, "pageNumber": 124, "pageCount": 224, "prevPage": 123, "nextPage": 125, "slideType": "other", "function": "summarize", "density": "dense", "nDataPoints": 0, "notes": "This appears to be a page from an academic book or journal article (page 110).", "elementsJson": [ "paragraph" ], "metadataConfidence": 0.9, "imagePath": null, "slideHref": "/slides/019dd923-5e88-73ef-bd59-dddef82be3b0/124", "deckHref": "/decks/019dd923-5e88-73ef-bd59-dddef82be3b0", "deckJsonHref": "/decks/019dd923-5e88-73ef-bd59-dddef82be3b0.json", "deckAnchorHref": "/decks/019dd923-5e88-73ef-bd59-dddef82be3b0#slide-124", "components": [ { "bbox": { "h": 0.15, "w": 0.8, "x": 0.1, "y": 0.35 }, "kind": "paragraph", "text": "An especially fascinating, powerful, and distinctive aspect of Petersen's model is the commodification of custom designed servitude. Rather than the vision of the colonial administration of an empire, it is a consumerist vision of individuals who go to a vending machine to custom design a slave, an intimate subjectivity of empire for John Doe, who can now have his own little colony of sentient servers to “orgasmic-ally” launder his clothes, presumably among many other duties.", "attrs": null, "subkind": "paragraph", "toolName": null, "toolSlug": null, "confidence": null, "componentId": "0b0c8701-013b-49e3-9483-9ccbd713e86c", "frameworkName": null, "frameworkSlug": null }, { "bbox": { "h": 0.25, "w": 0.8, "x": 0.1, "y": 0.5 }, "kind": "paragraph", "text": "The notions available for understanding and evaluating humanness in the digital future are impoverished by this kind of theorization. For Petersen, sentience is premised upon the capacity of the human to act upon one's desires, which are hardwired into the robot. Desire here is a highly reductive and deterministic conception of desire by design. He articulates a linear theory of causality from design to desire, systemically hardwired to produce servants who happily do laundry. As already addressed, despite Petersen's contention that the artificial persons that emerge from the Person-O-Matic act freely when choosing to serve, the fact that their design, if it is successful, precludes the possibility of not wanting to serve raises serious doubts as to whether the robots are actually exercising their free will to do their labors. This resonates with Murakami Woods' critique, in Chapter 2, of digital imaginaries that nudge humanness into commercially profitable and instrumental boxes.", "attrs": null, "subkind": "paragraph", "toolName": null, "toolSlug": null, "confidence": null, "componentId": "0e43706b-35c4-4cbe-977f-8e8759996df5", "frameworkName": null, "frameworkSlug": null }, { "bbox": { "h": 0.2, "w": 0.8, "x": 0.1, "y": 0.75 }, "kind": "paragraph", "text": "One of the central problems of Petersen's conception of robot sentience – like Murakami Wood's smart city denizen – is precisely that it is trapped within a narrow understanding of self-determination. This conception does not consider the social and historical constitution of subjectivities within cultural parameters that vary and produce contingent desires that are not reducible to the underlying hardwiring (genetic or otherwise). Desire is always multifaceted and leads to unintended consequences, even in excess, incomprehensible even for the subject that desires. Hence, once an artificial being acquires an emoting sentience of some sort, engineering identities is not a case of linear causalities that follow an imaginary teleology of desire in a genetic or computational fantasy of hardwiring. Hardwiring, genetic/computational engineering, and natural selection are the names of Petersen's “game” and, as a result, Petersen is not engaging with the social production and cultural inscription of sentient robot subjectivities and, accordingly, he occludes the", "attrs": null, "subkind": "paragraph", "toolName": null, "toolSlug": null, "confidence": null, "componentId": "4b94c367-beae-4333-8495-d011aff39acd", "frameworkName": null, "frameworkSlug": null }, { "bbox": { "h": 0.25, "w": 0.8, "x": 0.1, "y": 0.1 }, "kind": "paragraph", "text": "or the native excesses that collapsed the discursive strictures of colonial otherness and destabilized the neat hierarchies imposed by the imperial discourses. Empires had to deal with the massive failure of their fantasies regarding the imaginary subservience and inferiority of others, but a digital future built on Petersen's model is actually much more violent because desire by design hardwires pleasure in serving the masters. It basically precludes dissent, either because their lesser sentience has been designed effectively or because the dissent is a highly remote possibility. Hence the combination of limited sentience marked by a programmed incapacity to dissent poses the uncomfortable technological culmination of the fantasies of biological determinism that took definite shape as part of colonial endeavors.", "attrs": null, "subkind": "paragraph", "toolName": null, "toolSlug": null, "confidence": null, "componentId": "cf2557e1-d83e-4edb-967c-67224cb94f1d", "frameworkName": null, "frameworkSlug": null }, { "bbox": { "h": 0.03, "w": 0.9, "x": 0.05, "y": 0.97 }, "kind": "source-note", "text": "Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. 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