David J Gunkel
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 1377408 |
|---|---|
| NOME | David J Gunkel |
| PRENOMES | David J |
| SOBRENOME | Gunkel |
| ASSINATURA | GUNKEL D J |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Northern Illinois University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9385-4536 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 48 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 123 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 47 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 1 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1997 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 5 |
The différance engine
Persuasive machines
Response to The Mind–Technology Problem in the Age of GenAI
Prompted by Me. Generated by ChatGPT
This essay—which is not only about human-machine collaboration but is a performance in human-machine collaboration—interrogates the shifting terrain of authorship and creativity in the age of generative artificial intelligence (GAI). Challenging both the instrumentalist view of technology and the romantic myth of the singular genius, it argues for a reconceptualization of creative production as distributed, dialogical, and co-constituted. Drawing…
Artificial Intelligence and the future of work
Beyond cyborgs
This article contributes to the philosophical inquiry of Artificial Intelligence (AI) by reframing the question “Where is the intelligence of Artificial Intelligence?” into “Where does AI intelligently operate?”. This rephrasing challenges our understanding of AI’s role in social practices and its integration into the human experience. Central to this discourse is the concept of the ‘ cybork ’ (a portmanteau of ‘cyborg’ and ‘work’), which symboli…
Cut the crap
In a recent thought-provoking essay called “ChatGPT is Bullshit,” Hicks, Humphries and Slater call such large language models (LLMs) “bullshitters” and “bullshit machines.” Unlike the term “bullshit,” they argue, commonly used anthropomorphic terms such as “hallucination” and “confabulation” mispresent LLMs and sow confusion that could be socially harmful. This paper criticizes their essay in two steps. First, its reliance on Harry Frankfurt’s cl…
The promise of monsters
ChatGPT
Large language models such as ChatGPT enable users to automatically produce text but also raise ethical concerns, for example about authorship and deception. This paper analyses and discusses some key philosophical assumptions in these debates, in particular assumptions about authorship and language and—our focus—the use of the appearance/reality distinction. We show that there are alternative views of what goes on with ChatGPT that do not rely o…
Duty Now and for the Future
This essay examines whether and to what extent the “other” in communicative interactions may be otherwise than another human subject and the moral opportunities and challenges this alteration would make available to us. Toward this end, the analysis proceeds in five steps or movements. The first reviews the way the discipline of communication has typically perceived and theorized the role and function of technology. The second and third parts inv…
Person, Thing, Robot
Beyond ownership
As artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled social robots continue to enter our lifeworlds, we will need to grapple with challenges to assumptions about our relationship to and even with these technological objects. This essay works at the intersection of social robotics, legal studies, and human–machine communication to explore the concept of ownership in human–machine relations. In particular, we draw on more-than-human approaches to ask: To what e…
The Relational Turn
In The Relational Turn, David J. Gunkel addresses the question of moral standing. The chapter begins by first identifying and critically examining three seemingly intractable philosophical difficulties with the standard method for deciding questions of moral status. In response to these demonstrated difficulties, the second section introduces and describes an alternative model, one which shifts the emphasis from internal properties of the individ…
The Symptom of Ethics; Rethinking Ethics in the Face of the Machine
This essay argues that it is the machine that constitutes the symptom of ethics— “symptom” understood as that excluded “part that has no part” in the system of moral consideration. Ethics, which has been historically organized around a human or at least biological subject, needs the machine to define the proper limits of the moral community even if it simultaneously excludes such mechanisms from any serious claim on moral consideration. The argum…
Moral Status and Intelligent Robots
The great technological achievements in the recent past regarding artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, and computer science make it very likely, according to many experts in the field, that we will see the advent of intelligent and autonomous robots that either match or supersede human capabilities in the midterm (within the next 50 years) or long term (within the next 100–300 years). Accordingly, this article has two main goals. First, we dis…
Debate
Deconstruction
An accessible introduction to a concept often considered impossibly abstruse, demonstrating its power as a conceptual tool in the twenty-first century. This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series offers a clear and concise introduction to a topic often considered difficult and abstruse: deconstruction. David Gunkel sorts out the concept, terminology, and practices of deconstruction, not to defend academic orthodoxy, or to disseminate …
Mind the gap
Digital Contact Tracing
This essay investigates digital media devices and networks for addressing the spread and control of the novel coronavirus/COVID-19 infection. But unlike many of the other essays in this special issue, it will not focus on the message — the information and misinformation, the accurate reportageand the rumors, or the news and the fake-news— that is conveyed onthese digital platforms. Instead, I will focus on the use of digital mobile devices and ne…
Virtual Subjectivities
Virtual Subjectivities: A Review of Stefano Gualeni and Daniel Vella’s Virtual Existentialism [Stefano Gualeni and Daniel Vella, Virtual Existentialism: Meaning and Subjectivity in Virtual Worlds, Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020]
Shifting Perspectives
I saw it on YouTube! How online videos shape perceptions of mind, morality, and fears about robots
Robots have the potential to transform our existing categorical distinctions between “property” and “persons.” Previous research has demonstrated that humans naturally anthropomorphize them, and this tendency may be amplified when a robot is subject to abuse. Simultaneously, robots give rise to hopes and fears about the future and our place in it. However, most available evidence on these mechanisms is either anecdotal, or based on a small number…
Žižek Studies
Zizek Studies
Robot Rights
A provocative attempt to think about what was previously considered unthinkable: a serious philosophical case for the rights of robots. We are in the midst of a robot invasion, as devices of different configurations and capabilities slowly but surely come to take up increasingly important positions in everyday social reality—self-driving vehicles, recommendation algorithms, machine learning decision making systems, and social robots of various fo…
Second Thoughts
This article introduces critical perspective into the discussion of the digital divide, which is commonly defined as the gap separating those individuals who have access to new forms of information technology from those who do not. The analysis is distinguished from other undertakings addressing this matter, insofar as it does not document the empirical problems of unequal access but considers the terminology, logical structure, and form that def…
Rethinking the Digital Remix
Critical evaluations of audio mash-ups and remixes tend to congregate around two poles. On the one hand, these often clever re-combinations of recorded music are celebrated as innovative and creative interventions in the material of bland commodity culture. On the other hand, they are often reviled as derivative, inauthentic, and illegal because they do nothing more than appropriate and reconfigure the intellectual property of others. This essay …
Facing Animals
Beyond ownership
As artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled social robots continue to enter our lifeworlds, we will need to grapple with challenges to assumptions about our relationship to and even with these technological objects. This essay works at the intersection of social robotics, legal studies, and human–machine communication to explore the concept of ownership in human–machine relations. In particular, we draw on more-than-human approaches to ask: To what e…
The real problem
It is often assumed that the problem with ‘virtual reality’ — the concept, its various technological deployments and the apparently oxymoronic phrase itself — has been our understanding, or perhaps misunderstanding, of the virtual. The real problem, however, is not with the virtual; it is with the real itself. This article investigates the undeniably useful but ultimately mistaken and somewhat misguided concept of the real that has been routinely…
We Are Borg
Journal Article We Are Borg: Cyborgs and the Subject of Communication Get access David Gunkel David Gunkel 1David J. Gunkel is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at Northern Illinois University. He received his PhD in philosophy from DePaul University, Chicago, IL. His critical investigations of computer-mediated communication and cyberculture can be found in Critical Studies in Mass Communication, the Journa1 of Mass Media…
I saw it on YouTube! How online videos shape perceptions of mind, morality, and fears about robots
Robots have the potential to transform our existing categorical distinctions between “property” and “persons.” Previous research has demonstrated that humans naturally anthropomorphize them, and this tendency may be amplified when a robot is subject to abuse. Simultaneously, robots give rise to hopes and fears about the future and our place in it. However, most available evidence on these mechanisms is either anecdotal, or based on a small number…
The Internet of things
What Does it Matter Who is Speaking? Authorship, Authority, and the Mashup
This essay investigates the figure of the author and the concept of authorship in audio mashups and remixing. The analysis traces the development and functional aspects of this particular authority figure, entertains the recent crisis in authorship that has led to claims of the “death of the author,” and investigates the way both aspects shape our understanding of and responses to the mashup. The objective of the investigation is not to provide a…
Cut the crap
In a recent thought-provoking essay called “ChatGPT is Bullshit,” Hicks, Humphries and Slater call such large language models (LLMs) “bullshitters” and “bullshit machines.” Unlike the term “bullshit,” they argue, commonly used anthropomorphic terms such as “hallucination” and “confabulation” mispresent LLMs and sow confusion that could be socially harmful. This paper criticizes their essay in two steps. First, its reliance on Harry Frankfurt’s cl…
Comunicação e inteligência artificial
Este artigo advoga em favor de significativas reorientações e reconceitualizações dos estudos do campo da Comunicação, de maneira a acomodar as oportunidades e desafios introduzidos pelas máquinas cada vez mais inteligentes. Particularmente, buscamos demonstrar, por um lado, como e porque a atividade comunicacional vem sendo considerada uma condição definidora da inteligência artificial (IA) e, por outro lado, como a teoria da IA e o desenvolvime…
The Machine Question
Ethics, especially communication ethics, is customarily understood as being concerned with questions of responsibility for and in the face of an other with whom we interact and exchange information. This Other is more often than not conceived of as another human being. This anthropocentric assumption has been significantly challenged by computer technology, intelligent systems, virtual realities, and cybernetics, all of which introduce the possib…
Lingua ex Machina
Configurations - Volume 7, Number 1, Winter 1999
Virtual geographies
This article embarks on an exploration of what recent technical and popular discourses have called “the new world of cyberspace.” Employing a cultural studies approach, it investigates the legacy, logic, and consequences of this appellation that appear to connect cyberspace to the Columbian voyages of discovery and the larger network of European expansionism. It therefore engages in a critical investigation of the colonial logic implied by this s…
The empire strikes back again
article The empire strikes back again: the cultural-politics of the Internet Share on Author: David Gunkel Assistant Professor of Communication Technologies, Northern Illinois University Assistant Professor of Communication Technologies, Northern Illinois UniversityView Profile Authors Info & Claims ACM SIGCAS Computers and SocietyVolume 27Issue 4Dec. 1997 pp 18–21https://doi.org/10.1145/270913.270921Online:01 December 1997Publication History 0ci…
Lingua ex Machina
Configurations - Volume 7, Number 1, Winter 1999
We Are Borg
Journal Article We Are Borg: Cyborgs and the Subject of Communication Get access David Gunkel David Gunkel 1David J. Gunkel is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at Northern Illinois University. He received his PhD in philosophy from DePaul University, Chicago, IL. His critical investigations of computer-mediated communication and cyberculture can be found in Critical Studies in Mass Communication, the Journa1 of Mass Media…
Second Thoughts
This article introduces critical perspective into the discussion of the digital divide, which is commonly defined as the gap separating those individuals who have access to new forms of information technology from those who do not. The analysis is distinguished from other undertakings addressing this matter, insofar as it does not document the empirical problems of unequal access but considers the terminology, logical structure, and form that def…
What's the Matter with Books
pletely disappear; books may long continue to be printed for certain kinds of texts and for luxury consumption.But the idea and ideal of the book will change: print will no longer define the organization and presentation of knowledge, as it has for the past five centuries." 5 Questioning whether the computer will destroy or displace the book is not something that is unique to Bolter's Writing Space.In fact, Father Frollo's apocalyptic statement h…
The Machine Question
Ethics, especially communication ethics, is customarily understood as being concerned with questions of responsibility for and in the face of an other with whom we interact and exchange information. This Other is more often than not conceived of as another human being. This anthropocentric assumption has been significantly challenged by computer technology, intelligent systems, virtual realities, and cybernetics, all of which introduce the possib…
The Virtual Dialectic
The Virtual Dialectic: Rethinking The Matrix and its Significance David J. Gunkel (bio) Rather than designating the choice between good and evil, my Either/Or designates the choice by which one chooses good and evil or rules themout.1 The debates and decisions surrounding virtual reality, cyberspace, and other forms of computer-mediated communication have been, like so much philosophical reasoning within the Western tradition, organized around an…
The Matrix Reconsidered
This article employs the conceptual opposition of the red and blue pill that is presented in The Matrix trilogy as a mechanism for investigating the philosophical antagonisms and structural conflicts commonly associated with the ‘information society’. The text is divided into two main parts: The first reconsiders the logical structure of this pharmacological dialectic, arguing that the choice between these two alternatives originates in the histo…
Rethinking the Digital Remix
Critical evaluations of audio mash-ups and remixes tend to congregate around two poles. On the one hand, these often clever re-combinations of recorded music are celebrated as innovative and creative interventions in the material of bland commodity culture. On the other hand, they are often reviled as derivative, inauthentic, and illegal because they do nothing more than appropriate and reconfigure the intellectual property of others. This essay …
The real problem
It is often assumed that the problem with ‘virtual reality’ — the concept, its various technological deployments and the apparently oxymoronic phrase itself — has been our understanding, or perhaps misunderstanding, of the virtual. The real problem, however, is not with the virtual; it is with the real itself. This article investigates the undeniably useful but ultimately mistaken and somewhat misguided concept of the real that has been routinely…
The Machine Question
An investigation into the assignment of moral responsibilities and rights to intelligent and autonomous machines of our own making. One of the enduring concerns of moral philosophy is deciding who or what is deserving of ethical consideration. Much recent attention has been devoted to the "animal question"—consideration of the moral status of nonhuman animals. In this book, David Gunkel takes up the "machine question": whether and to what extent …
Materials Science
Mashing up the languages of conceptual writing, new media poetics, performance art, and remixology artist Mark Amerika's “Remixing the I” flips the script on conventional forms of writing about subjectivity. In this work of artist theory, the author conducts an experimental “close reading” or what he refers to as a remixological inhabitation of texts written by artists and writers such as Kathy Acker and Nam June Paik. In the course of his concep…
What Does it Matter Who is Speaking? Authorship, Authority, and the Mashup
This essay investigates the figure of the author and the concept of authorship in audio mashups and remixing. The analysis traces the development and functional aspects of this particular authority figure, entertains the recent crisis in authorship that has led to claims of the “death of the author,” and investigates the way both aspects shape our understanding of and responses to the mashup. The objective of the investigation is not to provide a…
A Vindication of the Rights of Machines
Introduction to the Special Issue on Machine Morality
Facing Animals
Artificial Intelligence
This entry addresses artificial intelligence (AI) from the perspective of communication theory. In particular, it demonstrates, on the one hand, how and why the activity of communication has been considered a defining condition for AI and, on the other hand, how the theory of AI and the development of AI applications complicate the subject of communication, requiring significant modifications in its conceptual apparatus and philosophical framewor…
Response to “The Problem of the Question About Animal Ethics” by Michal Piekarski
In this brief article we reply to Michal Piekarski’s response to our article ‘Facing Animals’ published previously in this journal. In our article we criticized the properties approach to defining the moral standing of animals, and in its place proposed a relational and other-oriented concept that is based on a transcendental and phenomenological perspective, mainly inspired by Heidegger, Levinas, and Derrida. In this reply we question and proble…
Special Section
The Internet of things
Comunicação e inteligência artificial
Este artigo advoga em favor de significativas reorientações e reconceitualizações dos estudos do campo da Comunicação, de maneira a acomodar as oportunidades e desafios introduzidos pelas máquinas cada vez mais inteligentes. Particularmente, buscamos demonstrar, por um lado, como e porque a atividade comunicacional vem sendo considerada uma condição definidora da inteligência artificial (IA) e, por outro lado, como a teoria da IA e o desenvolvime…
Robot Rights
A provocative attempt to think about what was previously considered unthinkable: a serious philosophical case for the rights of robots. We are in the midst of a robot invasion, as devices of different configurations and capabilities slowly but surely come to take up increasingly important positions in everyday social reality—self-driving vehicles, recommendation algorithms, machine learning decision making systems, and social robots of various fo…
Gaming the System
Žižek Studies
Computer Science (30 obras) · Epistemology (25 obras) · Sociology (25 obras) · Philosophy (24 obras) · Psychology (14 obras) · Ethics and Social Impacts of AI (13 obras) · Political science (13 obras) · Engineering (12 obras) · Law (10 obras) · Neuroethics, Human Enhancement, Biomedical Innovations (10 obras)