Automating Intuition? : Genealogies of AI, Affect, and Discovery

Pedwell, Carolyn (2025) Automating Intuition? : Genealogies of AI, Affect, and Discovery. In: Automation Cultures :. MIT Press, pp. 1-26. (In Press)

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Abstract

As a mode of sensing, knowing, anticipating, and navigating the world that exceeds rational analysis, intuition is, this chapter will suggest, vital to attuning to contemporary algorithmic life – in which machine learning is actively re-distributing sensing and cognition across humans and machines and profoundly changing ‘what it means to perceive and mediate things in the world’. Efforts to automate intuition – and the sociotechnical possibilities, limitations, and risks entailed – have a rich and surprising post-war history across Britain and North America (and beyond). Dwelling within these transatlantic affective genealogies, I will argue, sheds light on current quests for artificial general intelligence and their heightened claims for machine sentience – with attention to shifting manifestations of human/inhuman, animacy/inanimacy, rationality/irrationality, and sensibility/sensability.