The Ethics of Computation

I actually cheated and read chapter nine of Cognition in the Wild a few weeks ago (or two weeks ago; it's all becoming a blur for me at this point). He makes an interesting comment in that chapter about what computation is, and I thought it would be valid to bring the point up because he alludes to it in the three chapters we were assigned for this week. (Speaking of which, though it is wonderfully written, it is terribly slow to read; Hutchins embeds his theory in the narrative of his sailing stories, which makes it almost impossible to skim the text to find the “important” parts.)

Hutchins makes a point of describing how computation is distributed across many devices (note the way he refers to navigation tools as analog or digital computers). He seems to use the model of computation to refer to processes that were called cognition in our other textbooks (I don’t think this is a problem, or that he is making a necessarily different argument than, say, Shore or Clark; I just thought it was interesting to note). By the final chapter he expands this idea to include groups of individuals operating as computing (cogitating?) “machines.” When computation tasks are being handled by actual human actors, the question of what types of computation tasks are legitimate to ask those actors to participate in arises. For example, Kenneth Burke uses the example of scientists working on weapons technology to complicate the idea that there is such a thing as “pure science” that can be divorced from real-world effects.

My thinking has reached a dead end here. Does anyone else think this is a legitimate issue to discuss in terms of cognition/computation?