Critical Technical Practice

1. Critical Technical Practice Based on Phil Agre’s formulation

2. Critical Technical Practice “A technical practice for which critical reflection upon the practice is part of the practice itself.” p. 307 in reader “Rigorous reflection upon the technical ideas and practices becomes an integral part of day-to-day-technical work itself.” p. 3 in original “Awareness of its own workings as a historically specific practice.” p. 23 in original

3. Critical analysis “Draws attention to structural and cultural levels of explanation – things that happen through our actions but [may] exist beneath our conscious awareness” • Highlights and problematizes the taken-for-granted; inherited ideas, orientations, assumptions, values, methods, understandings that are reproduced through discourses and practices of any practice community

4. Purposes • “Critical analysis quickly becomes lost unless it is organized and guided by an affirmative…purpose” • “my own moral purpose is to confront certain prestigious technical methodologies [in AI] that falsify and distort human experience…the purpose of critical work, simply put, is to explain how this sort of problem arises.” • “The main unit of analysis in my account of technical practices are discourses and practices, not the qualities of individual engineers and scientists.” p. 23

5. His method – CTP in AI • Focus on • Computational theories of action • The dynamics of a machinery’s/architectures engagement with its environment • Awareness of extent to which computational ideas are part of the history of ideas • In AI, ideas, assumptions about the nature of thought – mostly Cartersian • And therefore critiques, alternatives exist

6. What would Critical Technical Practice in SIMSconsist of? And is it relevant to you?