2nd Ethnographies of Science & Technology Workshop
第二回「科学技術の民族誌研究会」
Human-Machine Relations in the Information Society
【日時】2011年2月17日14時より
【場所】大阪大学人間科学研究科（吹田キャンパス）東館106
アクセス：http://www.hus.osaka-u.ac.jp/access/access.html
問い合わせ先：森田敦郎 morita@hus.osaka-u.ac.jp
ABSTRACT
That technology is growing ‘exponentially’ is nearly a given in the current historical moment. With each passing year, computers become faster, electronic storage units become more capacious, and network capacities multiply. Moore’s Law, a prediction made by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in 1965, suggested that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit might double every 18 months. This is said to have held true up until the present, providing the primary engine powering the information economy. According to transhumanist futurist Ray Kurzweil, the exponential is also marker of the limit of human knowledge and capability: humans are linear creatures who can only barely imagine the power of exponential growth. In his view, humanity faces an existential crisis: it must become exponential by fusing with exponentially growing technology, or remain linear and obsolete as the rest of the technological world flies by. The exponential curve is a visual and narrative device for imagining near and distant futures. It points to the limits of our biology and the vastness of the human-machine future; the exhilaration of riding the accelerating wavefront of technological evolution and the terror of facing improbable catastrophes – which, as our speed through human history increases, become near certainties. Through the ‘exponential,’ these and other possible futures come to weigh on actors in the present. In this paper, I draw on an initial analysis of my fieldwork among transhumanists in North America to sketch the outlines of a “regime of anticipation” (Adams, Murphy and Clarke, 2009) which I tentatively call ‘exponential’ – a politics which joins sensual and cognitive interfaces of human bodies and information technologies with the hopes and anxieties of living in an information society. Drawing on my fieldwork, I will discuss and offer the exponential as a figure for thinking about how particular visions of the future are experienced and acted upon by transhumanists living in North America. See more in: Adams, V., Murphy, M., & Clarke, A. E. (2009). Anticipation: Technoscience, life, affect, temporality. Subjectivity (28): 246-265.
PROGRAM
14:00 Introductory Remarks
Atsuro Morita (Department of Anthropology, Osaka University)
14:15 Hope Springs Exponential: Anticipation, Human-Machine Relations, and Exponential Politics of an Information Society
Grant Jun Otsuki (Department of Anthropology, Toronto University)
15:15 Discussant
Gergely Mohacsi (CARLS, Keio University)
15:30 General Discussion