The article reflects on where AI is headed and the world along with it, considering trust, ethics and safety. Implicit in artificial thinking and doomsday appraisals is the engineered divorce from reality of sublime human embodiment. Jeffrey White, Dietrich Brandt, Jan Soeffner, and Larry Stapleton, four scholars associated with AI & Society, address these issues, and more, in the following exchange.

Fritz Breithaupt’s “Three-Person Model of Empathy” (2012) offers a brilliant approach to relate empathy to side-taking. By thereby grounding empathy in subjective observation though, it becomes difficult to focus on how empathy interferes with phenomena of shared and embedded activity. This comment therefore raises the question of how Breithaupt’s theory of empathy can be related to phenomena of participatory sense-making and second-person interaction.

A myriad of sensations inform and direct us when we engage with the environment. To understand their influence on the development of our habitus it is important to focus on unifying processes in sensing. This approach allows us to include phenomena that elude a rather narrow view that focuses on each of the five discrete senses in isolation. One of the central questions addressed in this volume is whether there is something like a sensual habitus, and if there is, how (...) it can be defined. This is especially done by exploring the formation and habituation of the senses in and by a culturally shaped habitat. Two key concepts, Synaesthesia and Kinaesthetics, are addressed as essential components for an understanding of the interface of habitat and the rich and multisensory experience of a perceiving subject. At a Berlin-based conference Synaesthesia and Kinaesthetics, scholars from various disciplines gathered to discuss these issues. In bringing together the outcome of these discussions, this book gives new insights into the key phenomena of sensory integration and synaesthetic experiences, it enriches the perspectives on sensually embedded interaction and its habituation, and it expands this interdisciplinary inquiry to questions about the cultures of sensory habitus. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Freedom to BreatheJan Söffner (bio)It almost goes without saying: During the current pandemic, breathing lost its mere subliminal existence as an automated subsystem of our conscious existence and gained an oppressive presence. It did so in medical terms, in the spread of a virus attacking the respiratory system. It did so in terms of the lockdowns that virtualized much of our physical existence, cutting breath off from being (...) part of the communal atmosphere we dwell in. It did so in terms of the fear of taking in the contaminated breath of others, or of letting others inhale our own viruses. It did so by forcing us to wear face masks that simultaneously protected and obstructed our breath, and made us constantly smell our own bad breath. It did so by means of a fear, and regulation-induced deformation of our embodied interaction–which forced us to avoid each other rather than share our embodied lives. Breathing emerged into consciousness in a way that problematized the permeability of our breathing bodies, promoting instead an increasingly monadic existence reducing that permeability–an existence allowing only for an extremely mediated partaking in the world and interacting with others, as if (or indeed) talking to images on a computer screen.This change to our everyday breathing activity, as I will argue, profoundly altered the "metaphor we live by" that breathing is: If the emotional and enacted feeling of being a breathing body is altered, and if the habits of breathing change, then the ways we organize and understand our lives using breathing as a metaphor will lead to different meanings. And these meanings can be centered around a new feel of longing for freedom–a feel by means of which the concept of freedom is changed as well.A bitter example is the now worldwide awareness, and, as I will argue, altered understanding of the rallying cry, "I can't breathe." Originating from the 2014 police murder of Eric Garner, these had also been George Floyd's last words, uttered while being suffocated by police officers in 2020. The agony condensed in these words provided for an even more powerful metaphor to be adapted by the Black American community and beyond: people who had not literally been suffocated, but for whom the phrase spoke on their systemic historical oppression. [End Page 145] "I can't breathe" became a metaphor upon which a continuing legacy of repressions was projected.Yet, the term "metaphor," as precise as it is, can be misleading, because it seems to suggest this act of generalizing the lack of breath to be an act of mere comparison: People who are suppressed and metaphorically lack the air to breathe would then simply compare their lives to the suffocation of George Floyd; the similarity between their suppression and his would then be brought down to an "as if," wherein Black communities would simply feel as if they were suffocated (while what their 'suffocation' really means would remain an open point). However, things are not that simple: Adopting the words "I can't breathe" as a "metaphor we live by" does not only turn George Floyd's last words into an iconic comparison; it also evokes and suggests suffocation as a "feeling of being," as an experiencing of one's own existence. "Metaphors we live by" (Lakoff and Johnson) reside on subliminal bodily re-enaction and embodied empathy, enabling us to experience a feeling of suffocation which–as a feeling–is as real as the coldness of anxiety (as Louise Bourgeois would have it [see Klemm et al. 321]) or the warmth of social inclusion. This experience of felt suffocation, in turn, helps us talk and think about the state of subaltern existence, by replacing the question of whether the subaltern can speak (per Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak [1988]) with the question of whether they can breathe. Doing so aids in expressing indignation, and provides conceptual and iconic clarity. The clarity and precision of such metaphors is not about concepts, but about existential feelings. And in order to provide for this particular precision, these metaphors do not only rely on acts of comparison; much more than this, they rely on acts... (shrink)