“Their Is No Such Thing as a Machine That Acts Outside of Relations With Humans”

Abstract

Starting with her early works on “Talk with Machines” (1986, republished in 2021) and her books Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication (1987) and Human-Machine Reconfigurations (2007a), Lucy Suchman not only opened up a new domain of scientific interest in humans and technology, but also showed how the scope of human machine relations needs to be reconceptualized. With her most recent works (2023a, 2023b), she not only widens the perspective on the contexts for machine usage, particularly by the military, but she also gives insights on how to conceptualize AI in terms of its ontological status and its agency. Discussing the relevance of the concept of autonomy for relations between humans and machines, Lucy Suchman clearly positions herself in the debate and demonstrates how we need to reconfigure and address so-called machine autonomy.