Making the world observable and accountable: An ethnomethodological inquiry into the distinction between illustration and exhaustion

Abstract

Abstract This article explores the connection between two fields, artificial intelligence (AI) and transhumanist posthumanism. In linking them, the author proposes a distinction of "exhaustion/illustration" to extend various discussions of to what extent AI can learn from human intelligence (HI) and vice versa. Ethnomethodology, whose aim is to study how social members make social settings “observable and accountable”, may contribute to our understanding of how, if possible, AI makes its accountings and accounting practices “observable and accountable”. Through the lens of ethnomethodology, the distinction will be demonstrated as two logics of approaching and understanding the world. In the beginning, the logic of illustration, belonging to the human mind, creates distance between humans and their world to make things understandable, with no regard to how things can be truly represented or not. Later in the history of scientific and technological development, especially in pursuing exactness, steadiness, and predictability, the logic of exhaustion has been gradually developed to eliminate distance through formalizing almost everything, resulting in a situation in which humans and machines imitate each other and become intertwined. In rejecting the grand narratives as post-modernists stated, what comes after has been to be another narrative occupied by the logic of exhaustion. It is this narrative that has penetrated daily life and becomes omnipresent. Humanities can be endangered by internalizing the logic and the relationships between humans and machines cannot be appropriately evaluated if the logic of illustration has been kept overlooked.