Human-Computer Entanglements: Psychology, Computing, and Artificial Intelligence in the 20th Century

Abstract

For the past eighty years, computing and the human sciences have been closely interconnected: computers have been perceived as augmenting, complementing, and, in some cases, entirely supplanting human minds. While scholars have long acknowledged the military-industrial context in which digital computers emerged, only recently they started problematizing how human-computer systems reflect the dominant imagination of what it means to be human. This panel investigates four episodes in the history of human-computer systems, which reveal a situated conception of human cognition that reflects the social epistemologies of “the human” contemporary to the moment of their design. Together, they demonstrate that during the period between 1950 and 1980, computer engineers did not pursue their agenda as a unified and autonomous discipline. By contrast, system designers drew liberally on the humanities and the social sciences—especially psychology—to guide their research. This panel explores how notions thought to be the hallmark of advanced cognition, such as “learning” and “creativity,” were given a material instantiation in specific computer systems. Likewise, researchers undertook detailed studies of human operators, counting, classifying, qualifying, and modelling them as “users.” This suggests that the place of the human in the history of computing is not so much to be discovered as rediscovered. An interdisciplinary eye on the rich historical archive of technical reports, scientific publications, design documents, and experimental protocols unpacks how sedimented prejudices and aspirational visions about humanity have shaped human-computer systems, and highlights what is at stake when researchers strive to model humanity in code and silicon.

Chair

• Joy Lisi Rankin

Discussant

• Charles Luke Alan Stark

Individual Presentations

• The Duality of the Personal Computer User: Psychologists and Secretaries at Xerox PARC, 1973-1983 - Sam Schirvar, History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania

• Programming the Creative Mind: Cognitive Psychology and the PLATO Computer in the 1960s-1970s - Ekaterina Babintseva, Harvey Mudd College

• Two Musical Episodes at the Piano Keyboard in the Study of Human Information-Processing: Information as “Cognitive Good” in Interdisciplinary Research - Eamonn Bell, Durham University

• “Production of Completely New Ideas not Deducible from Known Data”: Human Creative Activity as Early Machine Learning - Aaron Louis Mendon-Plasek, Columbia University

Session Organizers

• Ekaterina Babintseva, Harvey Mudd College

• Eamonn Bell, Durham University