Abstract
The human psychological condition arises in a strange loop. The mind is created within a cultural envelope which is itself created by the mind. Human identity is aquired as the cultural envelop is assimilated, a process in which other human agents are crucial. With the advent of information technology non-human agents have entered the loop. This paper discusses how this may affect our sense of who we are.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Anderson, W. (1996) (Ed.) The Fontana Postmodernism Reader. Fontana: London.
Baudrillard, J. (1983) Simulations Tran.s P. Foss. New York, Semiotext(e).
Baudrillard, J. (1993) Symbolic Exchange & Death. Sage, London.
Benjamin, W. (1979) The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. In Illuminations, translated by Zohn, H., pages 219–253. Fontana, London.
Brooks (1991) Intelligence Without Representation. Artificial Intelligence, 47: 139–160.
Buck-Morss, S. (1989) The Dialectics Of Seeing, Walter Benjamin And The Arcades Project. London, MIT Press, c1989
Clark, A. (1999) Towards an embodied cognitive science? Trends in Cognitive Science, 3(9): 345–351.
Deacon, T. (1997) The Symbolic Species. Penguin: London.
Dent-Read, C. & Zukow-Golding, P. (1997) Evolving explanations of development. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Donath, J. (1997) Inhabiting the Virtual City: The Design of Social Environments for Electronic Communities. Doctoral thesis presented Februrary 1997 to the Program of Media Arts and Sciences, School of Architecture & Planning, MIT. See: judith.www.media.mit.edu/Thesis/
Edelman, G. & Tononi, G. (2000) Consciousness: how matter becomes imagination. Penguin: London.
Edelman, G. (1992) Bright Air, Brilliant Fire. Penguin: London.
Elman, J. et al. (1996) Rethinkng Innateness: A Connectionist Perspective On Development. London: MIT Press.
Fogel, A., Lyra, M. & Valsiner, J.. (Ed.s) (1997) Dynamics and Indeterminism in Developmental and Social Processes New Jersey, Erlbaum.
Giddens, A. (1999) Runaway World: how globalisation is reshaping our lives, London: Profile Books.
Gray, C. (1995) The Cyborg Handbook. Routledge, London.
Griffin, D.R. (1988) (Ed.) The Reenchantment of Science: Postmodern Proposals, State University of New York Press, Albany, NY. p 173.
Harvey, D. (1990) The Condition of Postmodernity. Blackwell, Oxford.
Havel, V. (1995) Self Transcendence. In Resurgence, No. 169, March, pages 12–14. Also in Anderson, W. (1996)(Ed.) The Fontana Postmodernism Reader. Fontana: London.
Heidegger, M. (1977) The Question Concerning Technology. (Trans. Lovitt, W.) New York: Harper Row.
Horberg, J. (1995) Talk to my agent: software agents in virtual reality. Computer Mediated Communications, 2(2): 3–11.
Jameson, F. (1984) Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism. New Left Review, 146:53–93.
Jencks, C. (1992) (Ed.) The Postmodern Reader. Academy Editions, London.
Langton, C. (Ed.) (1995) Artificial Life: an Overview. MIT Press, London.
Lanier, J. (1995) Agents of Alienation. Journal of Consciousness Studies, Vol. 2(1): 76–81.
Maes, P. (1994) Agents that reduce work and information overload. Communications of the ACM, 37(7): 31–40.
Maes, P. (1995) Modeling Adaptive Autonomous Agents. In Artificial Life: An Overview, edited by Langton, C., MIT Press, London.
Marrow, P & Ghanea-Hercock, R. (2000) Mobile software agents. BT Technology Journal, 18(4): 129–139.
Minsky, M. (1985) The Society of Mind. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Mitchell, W. (1995) City of Bits. MIT Press, Cambridge.
Mumford, L. (1940) The Culture of Cities. London, Secker and Warburg.
Mumford, L. (1968) The Future of Technics and Civilisation. Freedom Press, London.
Norman, D. (1994) How might people interact with agents? Communications of the ACM, 37(7):68–76.
Nwana, H. (1999) A perspective on software agent research. Knowledge Engineering Review, 14(2): 125–142.
Port, R. & Van Gelder, T. (1995) (Ed.s) Mind as Motion. MIT Press: London.
Rogoff, B. (1995) Observing Sociocultural Activity on Three Planes. In Sociocultural Studies of Mind, edited by Wertsch, J. et al., Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.
Weizenbaum, J. (1976) Computer power and human reason: from judgment to calculation.-Freeman, San Francisco.
Wheeler, M. & Clark, A. (1999) Genie Representation: Reconciling Content and Causal Complexity. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 50: 103–135.
Winner, L (1995) Who Will Be In Cyberspace? The Information Society. Vol. 12, No. 1, pages 63–72.
Winograd, T. & Flores, F. (1987) Understanding Computers and Cognition. New York: Addison-Wesley.
Zweig, G. (1996) The Death of the Self in the Postmodern World. In Anderson, W. (1996)(Ed.) The Fontana Postmodernism Reader. Fontana: London.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2001 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Pickering, J. (2001). Human Identity in the Age of Software Agents. In: Beynon, M., Nehaniv, C.L., Dautenhahn, K. (eds) Cognitive Technology: Instruments of Mind. CT 2001. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 2117. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44617-6_39
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44617-6_39
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-42406-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-44617-0
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive