Interfacing AlphaGo
Embodied play, object agency, and algorithmic drama
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11924096 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Philippe Sormani (0000-0002-5890-899X, University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2023 |
| Volume | 53 |
| Issue | 5 |
| Pages | 686-711 |
| Publication date | 2023-09-27 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Social Studies of Science (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0306-3127 • E-ISSN: 1460-3659 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/03063127231191284 |
| PMID | 37753852 |
| OpenAlex | W4387077820 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 6 |
| References cited | 43 |
For decades, playing Go at a professional level has counted among those things that, in Dreyfus's words, 'computers still can't do'. This changed dramatically in early March 2016, at the Four Seasons Hotel in Seoul, South Korea, when AlphaGo , the most sophisticated Go program at the time, beat Lee Sedol, an internationally top-ranked Go professional, by four games to one. A documentary movie has captured and crafted the unfolding drama and, since AlphaGo 's momentous win, the drama has been retold in myriad variations. Yet the exhibition match as a technology demonstration-in short, the ' AlphaGo show '-has not received much scrutiny in STS, notwithstanding or precisely because of all the media frenzy, game commentary, and 'AI' expertise in its wake. This article therefore revisits the second game's 'move 37', its surprise delivery by AlphaGo on stage, and the subsequent line of commentary by the attending experts, initiated by the news-receipt token 'ooh'. Drawing upon a reflexive video analysis, the article explicates the Go move's scenic intelligibility-its embodied delivery as part of the technology demonstration-as the contingent result of intricate 'human/machine interfacing'. For mainstream media to report on AlphaGo 's 'superhuman intelligence', it both relied upon and effaced such interfacing work. In turn, the article describes and discusses how 'object agency' and 'algorithmic drama' both trade on skillfully embodied play as a pivotal interfacing practice, informing the exhibition match from within its livestream broadcast
Art · Drama · Embodied cognition · Exhibition · Literature · Media studies · Object (grammar · Political science · Scrutiny · Sociology · Visual arts · Computer Science · Digital Games and Media · Ethics and Social Impacts of AI · Law · Artificial Intelligence
What computers still can't do
The Ethnomethodology Program
Mastering the game of Go without human knowledge
Building machines that learn and think like people
Mastering the game of Go with deep neural networks and tree search
Imagining the thinking machine
The practice turn in contemporary theory
Title unavailable
Science Observed
Sequence Organization in Interaction
Language and social reality
Technology as (Dis-)Enchantment. AlphaGo and the Meaning-Making of Artificial Intelligence
Enchanted Determinism
Technologies of stage magic
Face value’
RFID ‘Theatre of the proof’
Theatre of Use
Does mathematics look certain in the front, but fallible in the back
Public Experiments and Displays of Virtuosity
Fun in Go
Video Recording Practices and the Reflexive Constitution of the Interactional Order
Deceitful Media
Anthropomorphizing AlphaGo
Situating methods in the magic of Big Data and AI
Put to the test
On Theory-Methods Packages in Science and Technology Studies
Governing Algorithms
A not quite random walk
The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies
Just what are we doing when we're describing AI? Harvey Sacks, the commentator machine, and the descriptive politics of the new artificial intelligence
Merleau-Ponty and the Measuring Body
Three Fragments From a Sociologist's Notebooks
| Unique citing works | 6 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 2 |
| Citation span | 2023 - 2025 (3) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 6 |