Bernard Stiegler is known as a leading philosopher of technics. He has developed an original interpretation of technics as an externalized epiphylogenetic memory that remembers in the p...

Assessments of the impact of automation often emphasize the need to “denaturalize” work. To what extent is denaturalization successful in separating proposals regarding the future of work from existing assumptions about its value? This article will explore this question by reading Bernard Stiegler’s politics of work in the context of his understanding of the family. It will demonstrate that while he denaturalizes work he also naturalizes background assumptions regarding its relationship to social reproductive labor by claiming that the latter is (...) “above and beyond the market.” This gesture reproduces gendered assumptions about the nature of work and fails to provide a critical account of the changing relationship between work, the family, and economic responsibility under neoliberalism. It will be concluded that Stiegler’s conservative approach to the relationship between work and the family shows that avoiding the unwitting naturalization of existing assumptions regarding work is a central problem for post-work critics. (shrink)

This paper explores the history of ELIZA, a computer programme approximating a Rogerian therapist, developed by Jospeh Weizenbaum at MIT in the 1970s, as an early AI experiment. ELIZA’s reception provoked Weizenbaum to re-appraise the relationship between ‘computer power and human reason’ and to attack the ‘powerful delusional thinking’ about computers and their intelligence that he understood to be widespread in the general public and also amongst experts. The root issue for Weizenbaum was whether human thought could be ‘entirely computable’. (...) This also provoked him to re-consider the nature of machine intelligence and to question the instantiation of its logics in the social world, which would come to operate, he said, as a ‘slow acting poison’. Exploring Weizenbaum’s 20th Century apostasy, in the light of ELIZA, illustrates ways in which contemporary anxieties and debates over machine smartness connect to earlier formations. In particular, this article argues that it is in its designation as a computational therapist that ELIZA is most significant today. ELIZA points towards a form of human–machine relationship now pervasive, a precursor of the ‘machinic therapeutic’ condition we find ourselves in, and thus speaks very directly to questions concerning modulation, autonomy, and the new behaviorism that are currently arising. (shrink)