Unruly Laboratories: Automation contra Rationalization

• In Event: 50462 - Section on Science, Knowledge, and Technology Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 7: Organizations

Abstract

Weber saw the modern organization as the main institutional structure of complex, industrial societies. The scientific laboratory is surely the most important institutional structure of the natural sciences, the 'fact factory' of knowledge production and a knowledge society. But the lab also rewrote the organization – as an entity not simply oriented to the coordination of human groups but one inseparable from object relations, in which governance structures can be determined by non-human objects. The sociology of organizations pays attention to organizational hierarchy, but the subdivisions of labs are largely 'ontologically', rather than hierarchically, related to the larger framework of a lab. Thus, the differences between alternate knowledge environments derives from the different lines of reality developed and 'farmed.'

In recent developments in the natural sciences, however, that reality is being subjected to quite different disciplinary processes, ones that “hack” aspects of laboratory epistemic culture and directly challenge understandings of epistemic subjecthood. Attempts to automate object relations go beyond high-throughput processes and now include AI-enabled artificial agents and autonomous, algorithm-directed experimental design. Fully developed laboratories of this sort are still partially embodied but are also partially instantiated online in digital twins and networked laboratory avatars coordinated by synthetic actors. This paper examines the de-rationalizing shifts underlying such endeavors as well as the struggles with notions of creativity, the reconfiguration of necessary collectivities, and other aspects of test-stage and implemented synthetic labs. The examples used will come from fields in which this development is most prominent, such as chemistry, physics, and biology.

Authors

• Karin Knorr Cetina, University of Chicago

• Joshua Silver, The University of Chicago