The intelligence of environments 173
being. The subtle additions or changes to that environment are what is supposed to
enhance human cognition and action while at the same instance human beings will
need to keep track of those additions and changes in order to avoid irritation. However, irritation would arise not only from incongruously implemented, unnatural
looking augmentations of reality that are cumbersome to interact with, but also
from augmentations so subtle that they would not be discernible in any way from
real-world objects and events anymore (FAR-a-2015). If the Gibsonian account
of pictorial forms is a reliable guide, the practical requirements for augmentations
that approach an ideal of perfect illusions will be improbably steep though.
Either way, the user is supposed precisely not to be concerned with anticipating the AR system’s purposes but only with the pursuit of his or her initial goals.
Thus, a significant asymmetry between human beings and AR systems lies in the
fact that the counterpart of human interaction is a modified environment, or a
modification of one’s perception of his environment, not something that can be
addressed as a clearly individuated being. AR technologies are meant to keep
track of human relations to their environment, whereas the reverse does not hold
under normal operating conditions, where the presentation of near-natural affordances takes centre stage and the aim of the technology is, after all, to become
ambient.
Naturalising the artificial
Throughout all examples in the previous sections, as different as they may appear
at first sight, one can identify at least one common thread: by artefactual means,
informational environments are modified or, in some cases, created. At a minimum, there is an interplay between the introduction and effects of artificial structures designed to make available, augment or otherwise affect the information for
an informational environment’s inhabitants on the one hand, and their attempts at
integrating whatever change these artefacts may effect into an established framework of reference – which might thus be altered itself. Or entire informational
environments are constructed from scratch, as it were – but will have to be integrated into an established framework of reference, too, as they do not exist in
complete isolation from such frameworks.
The informational environment and the artificial structures are of an obviously
very simple kind to the evolving robot in the evolutionary robotics example. The
entire external environment for the robot is artificially created, and hence all information that will be available to the robot – yet there is no anticipation in neither
that environment’s nor the robot’s design of how the signals of the one relevant
difference in this artificial environment will be tracked by him. If successful, the
robot will, over a number of runs of the experiment, develop a GS-constitutive
relation to that environment, as introduced by Peter Godfrey-Smith (1996a) and
discussed in Chapter 5, under which specific behaviours of tracking the domain
of signals of the difference between triangles and rectangles emerge. His informational environment is made up of the signals and the differences between signals
that he has to keep track of in order to prevail.
being. The subtle additions or changes to that environment are what is supposed to
enhance human cognition and action while at the same instance human beings will
need to keep track of those additions and changes in order to avoid irritation. However, irritation would arise not only from incongruously implemented, unnatural
looking augmentations of reality that are cumbersome to interact with, but also
from augmentations so subtle that they would not be discernible in any way from
real-world objects and events anymore (FAR-a-2015). If the Gibsonian account
of pictorial forms is a reliable guide, the practical requirements for augmentations
that approach an ideal of perfect illusions will be improbably steep though.
Either way, the user is supposed precisely not to be concerned with anticipating the AR system’s purposes but only with the pursuit of his or her initial goals.
Thus, a significant asymmetry between human beings and AR systems lies in the
fact that the counterpart of human interaction is a modified environment, or a
modification of one’s perception of his environment, not something that can be
addressed as a clearly individuated being. AR technologies are meant to keep
track of human relations to their environment, whereas the reverse does not hold
under normal operating conditions, where the presentation of near-natural affordances takes centre stage and the aim of the technology is, after all, to become
ambient.
Naturalising the artificial
Throughout all examples in the previous sections, as different as they may appear
at first sight, one can identify at least one common thread: by artefactual means,
informational environments are modified or, in some cases, created. At a minimum, there is an interplay between the introduction and effects of artificial structures designed to make available, augment or otherwise affect the information for
an informational environment’s inhabitants on the one hand, and their attempts at
integrating whatever change these artefacts may effect into an established framework of reference – which might thus be altered itself. Or entire informational
environments are constructed from scratch, as it were – but will have to be integrated into an established framework of reference, too, as they do not exist in
complete isolation from such frameworks.
The informational environment and the artificial structures are of an obviously
very simple kind to the evolving robot in the evolutionary robotics example. The
entire external environment for the robot is artificially created, and hence all information that will be available to the robot – yet there is no anticipation in neither
that environment’s nor the robot’s design of how the signals of the one relevant
difference in this artificial environment will be tracked by him. If successful, the
robot will, over a number of runs of the experiment, develop a GS-constitutive
relation to that environment, as introduced by Peter Godfrey-Smith (1996a) and
discussed in Chapter 5, under which specific behaviours of tracking the domain
of signals of the difference between triangles and rectangles emerge. His informational environment is made up of the signals and the differences between signals
that he has to keep track of in order to prevail.