Sabine Thürmel
Munich Center of Technology in Society, TU München, Munich, Germany
Inter-Agency in Technosocial Environments
A new kind of interplay between human beings and „computational objects” is emerging: „Computational objects do not simply things for us, but they do things to us as people, to our ways of seeing ourselves and others. Increasingly, technology also puts itself into a position to do things with us” (Turkle: A nascent robotics culture: new complicities for companionship, 2006).
Not only cooperating multi-robot systems but also software-based multi-agent systems (MAS) are on the rise. Demonstrators for the coordination of emergency response services in disaster management systems have been built. Humans may be integrated for clarifying and/or deciding non-formalized conflicts in an ad-hoc manner. Thus, novel contexts realizing collective and distributed agency materialize.
It becomes vital to understand sense-making and social cognition in these contexts. Perceiving the other is an act of “creative receptivity” (Merleau-Ponty) – both for the human and the technical agent.
To support this endeavour a conceptual framework for agency and action is introduced. It offers a multidimensional, gradual classification scheme for the observation and interpretation of scenarios where humans and nonhumans interact. In order to demonstrate the potential for agency not only the activity levels of any entities but also their potential for adaptivity, interaction, personification of others, individual action and conjoint action has to be taken into account. The potential for interaction is a precondition to any collaborative performance. The potential of the personification of others enables agents to integrate predicted effects of their own and other actions.
The multi-dimensional gradual agency approach may be used to describe situations, where options to act are delegated to technical agents. Scenarios where solely humans act can be compared to test-bed simulations. A basis for phenomenological accounts of action in the technosocial world is presented.