On Sight, Technology, and Science Fiction: Transhumanist Visions in Contemporary Canadian Dystopia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines a number of practices of observation as represented in contemporary Canadian dystopias in light of technological developments as seen by transhumanist thought. It argues that the transhumanist scopic practices that underlie their science-fictional imaginaries are in fact dystopian, and, as such, it takes examples from dystopian literature to illustrate how the nature of sight and seeing in the techno- and image-mediated context presents dangerous pitfalls for subject formation, identity politics, and agency. The article distinguishes between “vision” as a body of ideas and “sight” as the actual ways of seeing that may be reciprocal and create bonds of affectivity or, in the case of the transhumanist predicament, be instead founded on watching as the one-sided commodifying alternative.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.009 | 0.012 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.067 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".