Bruno Latour, Aramis, or the Love of Technology, PDF - Dss-edit.com

"Level III: the fixed equipment, each unit taking care of a sectorand a station. This equipment serves as intermediary between themobile units and the command post, and has to sort things out locallyin order to solve most problems without making everything go backto the top, which would go crazy if that happened.""They're missi dominici. ""If you insist on your political metaphors. Level IV: finally thehead, the central command post, which sees, understands, feels, decides,acts, orders, and manages the entire flow, but which would crashif all the information from each mobile unit were to come back to thecenter. Here's what we've got," I said, unfolding a new plate {Figure 13]."Terrific!" Norbert said. "There are human beings only at the twoends: in the pairs of cars, there are passengers carried away withenthusiasm; in the Central Command Post (PCC), there are operatorswho steer and drive. Between the two, in the mobile units, on thetracks, along the sectors, everything is done by nonhumans-but bytens of millions of them. And these nonhumans have names and capabilities;they're human parts. Now don't tell me that's not a fine pieceof anthropomorphism!""What's funny is that the PCC can't be a dictatorship, and herethe political metaphor holds up, because as I understand it, there's noway for a human being both to control 660 pairs of cars and to steerthem by remote control. It would be like driving 660 cars at a timewithout an accident. In any event, even if the PCC were made up ofFormula One drivers like Alain Prost, you can't transmit enoughinformation in both directions fast enough to react at 50 kilometers anhour and at a distance of 10 centimeters. You need a minimum ofdemocracy- -that is, delegation of tasks : the mobile units have to fendfor themselves, in part.""Ah! You see! So this time we 're doing politics again for realpoliticsin things. I'm playing the dictator, you're playing the democrat,"said Norbert, whose choice did not surprise me.And we replayed the software in order to test Aramis' viability.ARAlV\IS AT Till: CfT STAGE