ABSTRACT
The history of work is a chronicle of technological innovation, of endeavors to develop tools and machines that augment or supplant human muscles and, more recently and controversially, native human intelligence. With each new technology questions arise about what it can and cannot and especially what it should and should not do; Woolgar (1987: 312) notes that these discussions ‘are the reverse side of the coin to debates on the capacity, ability, and moral entitlements of humans.’ But the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) as a significant area of both scientific research and industrial application has dramatically shifted the ground, as the idea of substituting machine or ‘artificial’ intelligence for human minds raises fundamental questions about our capabilities as a species; that is, about what it means to be human. Woolgar puts it thus:
[W]hen technology predominantly was composed of prosthetic devices (functional additions to the mechanical abilities of the human body), it could always be argued that humans are unique by virtue of their intellectual faculties; no prosthetic device could emulate a human’s ability to reason, know, and understand. The work of AI, however, attempts to develop a technology that emulates the action and performance previously accredited to unique human intellectual abilities (Woolgar, 1987: 313).
