Sent from my Samsung Galaxy , an AT&T LTE smartphone NCA 2018 CFP: Playing with Perception, Toying with Intelligence: re-crafting human communication, cognition and consciousness. Call for Papers, Panelists, Participants:   No longer restricted to specialized groups or applications, ‘high-tech’ is everywhere. For example, incorporating many of the components and capacities previously only built into special industrial equipment, law enforcement and military technology, many consumer-grade items, including home security systems, domestic appliances, even children’s toys, now come equipped with 4G connectivity, high resolution infrared/night vision, two-way communication, and audio-visual recording capability.     Considering another set of examples, from those mundane ‘conversations’ with Google Now, Alexa, Cortina and Siri, to some of the most sophisticated and convincing interactions with digital constructs of various kinds, every day more people either choose to live with or find themselves by default living among ‘intelligent machines’ and/or artificial intelligences featuring the impressive satisficing abilities of heuristic algorithms. We are in the midst of a culture-wide Turing Test as these systems continue to push the envelope toward convincingly simulating the experience of talking and/or interacting with other humans.     As the technological augmentation and digital bootstrapping of our species continues to unfold, what specific changes to the human sensorium are in the offing?  How are vision, hearing, memory and other components of perception and cognition being altered along the way?  What does the future hold for the kind of communication, being and seeing in the world afforded by these everyday artifacts?  Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological approach and McLuhan's general ‘prosthesis thesis’ provide some of the theoretical underpinning for what promises to be a collection of intimate analyses of recent consumer-level developments incorporating systems built around (or, designed primarily to facilitate) artificial intelligence and machine learning. What’s becoming clear is that many of the attendant devices and systems play with perception and fiddle with the phenomenological aspects of human experience in unprecedented ways.     Contributors to this panel should focus on the present moment and emerging future of automated systems, AI, machine learning, augmented sensory apparatuses, remote communication and control systems, and the like.   For full consideration send papers, working drafts, outlines or abstracts no later than March 15th to robert_macdougall@curry.edu . Those interested in serving as moderator or respondent should send updated CV by same deadline.