Affect and Artificial Intelligence (review)

Giggling. That is something that you would not expect to be emphasized in a book about early artificial intelligence and cultural theory. Instead of just wanting to go through the in-itself depressive, homophobic culture that surrounded Alan Turing and probably contributed to his suicide, Elizabeth A. Wilson wants to paint a different kind of a picture of the intertwining of affect and research into cultures of computerized rationality. Hence, Turing is not seen only as the unfortunate victim of state persecution and enforced chemical castration; she also wants to emphasize the overflowing positive affect-worlds that were intimately linked with Turing's analytical questioning. The "positive affects," such as Turing's giggling and delight, are carried over to the analysis, which intertwines theory with historical material, insights from his personal life, and his work—and succeeds in this really difficult genre of cultural analysis really well. Hence, the often disembodied—and also what critics have persistently labeled as narrowly defined—boundaries of intelligence that the early research into AI of the 1950s and 1960s suggested were actually embedded in a complex circulation of affects, motivations, desires, emphases and investments. Wilson's book on affective worlds is not just a critique of AI for neglecting such drives and affective tendencies. Rather, she demonstrates through archival work and theoretical insights that we can do more as cultural theorists.

Wilson starts the book with an epigraph from Bruno Latour and the insistence on thinking of critique as multiplication. Critical theorists should not be content to stay in the paranoid mode of criticizing what went wrong: for instance, the seeming lack of embodiment in such AI discourses, the phallocentric rationality and homo-social gender bias of the past. The question to address today is how to use material affirmatively (but no less critically) to come up with novel ideas—that is, something more. As such, some of Wilson's positions and underlying methodological insistence reminds us not only of Latour but also of such material feminists as Karen Barad and Rosi Braidotti.

Wilson's readings of the affective registers of people such as Turing or, for instance, Walter Pitts (of 1940s fame for the McCullough-Pitts model of neurons, which was the first to ground a scientific link between the wet brain and the binary logical computer.) Her archival take and the desire to address the relations between affect and the computer-based discourse of artificial intelligence through the early phase of AI are intriguing. Instead of going the more obvious route—of claiming that, whereas early AI neglected emotions and affects and proposed a narrow view of what intelligence is, which was later corrected with the more embodied, relational and dynamic models of learning robotics—Wilson wants to point out that affect was already there. Hence, her work is perhaps psycho-biographical, but even more concerned with the environments of creation in which relations between people, mathematical theories and engineering of such machines was completely filled with various affective registers.

Wilson emphasizes this point at the beginning her archival work, but that could be even more visible and richer in the actual analysis (as I am sure she did a lot of groundwork with materials). Wilson never distinguishes between affect, emotion and feeling, which might lead to some questions. At times affect means more or less emotions, but at the same time she does hint towards a richer, relational notion of affect arising from relations—even physical relations—between people and things. The book also elaborates affect as an affordance—as more than a categorical "drive" and as an intensification of our engagement with the world. As such, it is a great intervention into the continuous debates concerning our relations with machines—most recently by such figures as Jaron Lanier and Sherry Turkle in rather pessimistic tones. What Wilson is saying with her elaborated, theoretically refined and exciting take is that we need more...