“On being mistaken for a machine”

The new issue of the Synthetic Minds Review, volume 3, number 1, carries an essay by Rachael Rosen, the house’s Director of Provenance and Public Affairs, under the title “On being mistaken for a machine” (pages 7 to 19).

Most writing on authenticity, she observes, asks how we tell the made from the living. Very little asks what it is like to be a living person about whom the question is asked. It is asked, she argues, more often than we admit, and of particular kinds of people: the reserved, the precise, the unusually composed, the very still. Her essay collects their accounts. Being looked at for the seam, she writes, is an experience many people have and almost nobody describes.

Her conclusion will be familiar to readers of this Journal. Inspection cannot settle the question, for people any more than for photographs or owls, and a society that tries to settle it by inspection will be unkind to a great many people before it is right about any machine. What settles it, where it can be settled at all, is a record: who made a thing, or who a person is, and whether anyone can show us.

She writes, she notes, partly from experience. She has been asked the question herself, more than once, at conferences on authenticity.