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Being a body or having one: automated domestic technologies and corporeality

  • 25th Anniversary Volume A Faustian Exchange: What is to be human in the era of Ubiquitous Technology?
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Abstract

New, “smart,” automated technologies for the home are playing a growing role in the construction and refurbishment of many new middle and upper class homes and assisted living facilities in the developed world, promising the improved performance of domestic tasks, as well as enhanced safety, convenience, and efficiency. Expanding the growing automatization of many activities in daily life, automated technologies in the home are interactive, ubiquitous, and often invisible. Their installation, in what is understood to be the locus of personal autonomy and identity, promotes a rethinking on the notion of the self as it is shaped and reshaped within the home. Because these technologies are user-centric, they bring to mind questions as to how their users are envisioned. The current study will focus on human physicality and on the materiality of the body as it is envisaged in the technologies themselves through the study of three automated domestic systems. It will ask if and how our understanding of being a body—or, perhaps, of having one—is redefined as these new technologies assume a growing role in the living of everyday domestic life.

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Notes

  1. While the development of smart home systems can be traced to the 1970s, it would only be in the 1980s and 1990s that ubiquitous computing and pervasive computing technologies would became better realized through wired and wireless home networking, sensor networks, networked appliances, mechanical and control engineering and computers themselves.

  2. The term ‘intelligent’ as applied to devices and apparatuses is used following (Minsky’s 1988) definition of artificial intelligence as the science of making machines do things that require intelligence if done by humans.

  3. Following are additional examples of ‘smart home’ functions that can both enhance and replace human activity (González-Martínez 2007):

    • Communication services: voice over IP (VoIP), IP videoconference, unified SMS messaging, instant messaging, etc.

    • Home remote managing services: air-conditioning, lights, technical alarms management (gas, water, fire…), video remote supervision, remote vigilance…

    • Extended home or homes networks, namely a virtual environment of interconnected homes in which services, devices, and content are shared.

    • Professional services: remote social or sanitary assistance, teleworking, teleoffice, remote maintenance, etc.

    • Contents and information access services: Internet, online shopping, online content…

    • Security services: Firewall, antivirus, antispam, parental control…

    • Digital leisure: Television on demand (IPTV), PVR (Personal Video Recording), online games, etc.

  4. See Patent Number 7,263,370, filed September August 10, 2004, at http://www.patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/PTO/search-bool.html, accessed December 2010, which describes the transmitter used to ascertain user identity and thus provide specialized services to household members.

  5. “Biometric readers are now coming onto the domestic market…This will appeal to people who want total flexibility and who dislike carrying keys around the house and yard with them or who want a high level of security for allowing access to their property,” states an Australian home journal. (http://melbourne.homedesignandliving.com.au/articles/the-way-of-the-future.html). In Popular Science (November 2006), biometric systems are similarly touted as the answer to an array of security concerns: “The new keys to security; bio-scanner let exactly who you want in—and no one else. If you want to make sure the cable guy at your doorstep is really from the cable company, just ask him to upload his biometric date (retinal scan, vein scan, fingerprint reading or facial-recognition data are all possible) to your home security system for on-site scanning. As the reliability of biometric identification grows, such systems will become virtually foolproof. Giving your neighbor a spare key to come in and take care of the cat while you’re way soon won’t be necessary—just enter your friend’s biometric data from a card he provides, and your scanner will recognize him when he visits.”

  6. See, for example, The Standalone Biometric Access Control, Flush Mounted ARX One by Kimaldi as shown at http://download.kimaldi.com/arx1_esp.swf.

  7. In addition to its application in home use, footstep biometric systems can be used for detection, as a means of switching systems on or off when people arrive, as a warning mechanism when a guarded area is approached, and more.

  8. In reality, of course, people do change—eyes become puffy, fingertips get rough, voices changes with age.

  9. Biometrics in home use differ from those used in the public sphere, as the later recognize the other as that who’s data is known to the system. Fed into its databank beforehand, the suspected and the unwanted are those singled out by technology in the public sphere (as, for example, in the use of biometric data in passport control procedures), whereas the standard and the normative, once identified as such, remain indistinguishable and anonymous.

  10. http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=8&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=domotic&OS=domotic&RS=domotic.

  11. For more on moral concerns related to persuasive technologies see, for example, Peter Paul Verbeek’s article “Persuasive Technology and Moral Responsibility—Toward An Ethical Framework For Persuasive Technologies.”

  12. As Lenoir (2002) describes Hayles distinction between the body as cultural construct versus embodiment: “The body” is an abstraction, implied by heterogeneous, overlapping systems of discourse and material practices; it is produced by medical, legal, political, and economic regulations, norms, and conceptualizations applied to actual physical bodies as objects to be ordered, organized, and interpreted. On the other side of these concepts and schemas for action are the individual material body and its experiences, which, though interpreted by the individual him or herself and society in terms of “the body,” are never fully captured and assimilated into discourse (211).

  13. While the application of persuasive technologies within the home for medical preventive or treatment purposes is not discussed in the current study, these technologies also raise important ethical questions. Two examples—the MyFoodPhone that promotes healthy eating habits by keeping track of food intake and biometric data while periodically connecting to a nutrition coach for personalized feedback, and the QuitKey, a mobile application to help users stop smoking—raise questions pertaining to one’s autonomy and ability to make choices when it comes to taking particular health risks.

  14. For more on the comparison between Merleau-Ponty and Foucault see for example “Body-Subject/Body-Power: Agency, Inscription and Control in Foucault and Merleau-Ponty,” by Crossley (1996).

  15. Latour offers the examples of frozen embryos, hybrid corn, and gene synthesizers (Latour 1993)—to name but a few.

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  1. The School of Philosophy, The Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel

    Michele Rapoport

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  1. Michele Rapoport
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Correspondence to Michele Rapoport.

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Rapoport, M. Being a body or having one: automated domestic technologies and corporeality. AI & Soc 28, 209–218 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-012-0406-2

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