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Short abstract:

Based on the case study of Google and N. Katherine Hayles’ ideas, the paper examines the intricate ideas of ‘human’ and ‘human-centeredness’, constructed on the wake of and vis-à-vis the exponential growth of intelligent automation.

Long abstract:

The Silicon Valley and its tech industries have drawn attention as the major hotbed of present-day technological utopianism or futurism, entrenched techno-solutionism and transhumanist visions (e.g. Tutton, 2021; Morozov, 2010; Huesemann, 2011; Bunn, 2022). Nevertheless, their global salience and positioning vis-à-vis world-wide consumer markets, at the same time, elicit less dazzling, mundane, down-to-earth public/stakeholder-oriented considerations and corporate sociotechnical imaginaries, (Mager & Katzenbach, 2020; Hockenhull, 2021) that address, generate meaning(s) and perform the advocacy of ongoing disruptive innovation in relationship to society and the current human condition, but are rarely systematically studied. Based on the case study of Google’s corporate initiatives and discourses over nearly a decade, my paper examines the intricate ideas of ‘human’ and ‘human-centeredness’, constructed on the wake of and vis-à-vis the exponential growth of intelligent automation and generative AI across the ‘big tech’s’ global ecosystem of digital services, products and infrastructures. Theoretically drawing on N. Katherine Hayles’ concept of ‘cognitive assemblages’ (Hayles, 2016, 2017), the paper argues that and demonstrates how Google’s enactment of humanness is peculiar, complicated and problematic. On the one hand, humans as tech consumers are enacted as ‘cognizers’, whose identity is inextricably intertwined with and projected upon the corporate designs of ‘cognitive non-conscious’ (of AI); on the other hand, the former entanglement as well as differences between human and non-human cognition are supressed and concealed, bringing forward the instrumental, utilitarian understanding of intelligent technologies that seeks to retain the modernist hierarchies of knowing/-ers and autonomy of the improvement-seeking human.