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  • Affective Machines
  • Orit Halpern (bio)
Elizabeth A. Wilson, Affect and Artificial Intelligence

The histories of both computing and psychoanalysis are full of performative machines that inspire the imagination, incite desire, and sometimes terrify the mind. We might, for example, recall Claude Shannon’s “rat” machine, which skillfully learned to navigate mazes at the Macy conferences in 1951 and amazed a bevy of behavioral and physical scientists with its intelligence and liveliness, only to have a few parameters changed, its memory readjusted and turned into a psychotic beast running in endless and futile circles. We might also think of Walter Grey’s small turtles wandering around in their lifelike efforts to find their way, feed themselves, and learn about their environment. Jacques Lacan labeled these small machine-animals “courageous,” for they revealed more than most analysts ever could about the nature of the psyche and the operations of drives. Like cybernetics, psychoanalysis is also full of machines and drives—the uncanny, the influencing machine, the death drive—that operate with sometimes seemingly mechanical repetitiveness and consistency and other times with autonomous unpredictability, causing love or pain, affiliation or hatred. What joins these machines, whether mythic or “real,” is their power in allowing us to envision and construct both ourselves and our technologies.

Elizabeth A. Wilson’s new book Affect and Artificial Intelligence (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010. Pp. xiv+182. $25) is another experiment in imagining machines. Like these aforementioned experiments, she brings the computational and psychoanalytic together to produce a stage upon which to make visible the many different possibilities lying latent in our relationship to, imagination of, and desire for intelligent machines. Wilson demonstrates with elegance in argument and prose that our understanding of what constitutes an artificial intelligence and a machine is deeply inflected by fantasy, performance, and emotion. The stories of cybernetic [End Page 189] theatrics and psychoanalytic automata are also apt, because Wilson makes her argument by parading a series of performances on the part of programmers, logicians, robots, and programs that, like Shannon’s rat, demonstrate how things can get either very lively and neurotic or very automatic, repetitive, and paranoid with but a few adjustments in parameters.

The arc of the book mirrors the human with the machine, each a doppelgänger haunting and troubling the stability of the other. The book is roughly partitioned into two parts. The first is an examination of the effort to model machine intelligence. Here, Alan Turing’s innovations in mathematics, logic, and computing are juxtaposed with the effort to produce intelligence through emotion in the robot Kismet. The second part is the inverse image of the first; it interrogates efforts to model psychology, cognition, and neural nets in humans by way of comparing the computer programs for artificial psychotherapy (ELIZA and PARRY) with the biography of Walter Pitts’s personal life and work on neural net logic.

Organizing this mirror narrative is the thesis “that humans have, from the beginning, direct affiliative inclinations for artificial-objects” (p. 95). Wilson argues that we seek affiliation with these artificial objects. It is not merely that we respond, react, or differentiate ourselves from these machines, but that we positively desire them; our relationship to technology is, Wilson imagines, not one of lies, deception, and antagonism, but one of hope, adoration, and aspiration.

Wilson grounds her discussion of subject and mechanism in Ferenczi’s famous statement on paranoia and neurosis: “Whereas the paranoiac expels from his ego the impulses that have become unpleasant, the neurotic helps himself by taking into the ego as large as possible a part of the outer world, making it the object of unconscious phantasies” (p. 26). Thus paranoiacs create enemies by expelling painful or repressed desires from within their own drives onto an external world—they “project.” In contrast, neurotics redirect their psychic pain toward affiliation, bringing objects and subjects from “outside” in and incorporating them into the subject in a positively constitutive act—they “introject.”

While this may all appear distant from concerns of technology and culture, we ignore the implications of these two psychological moves at our peril. In the paranoid model (one that Wilson argues dominates artificial intelligence research and media studies...

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