Philosophy of Technology

With the rise and public accessibility of AI-enabled decision-support systems, individuals outsource increasingly more of their decisions, even those that carry ethical dimensions. Considering this trend, scholars have highlighted that uncritical deference to these systems would be problematic and consequently called for investigations of the impact of pertinent technology on humans’ ethical decision-making. To this end, this article conducts a systematic review of existing scholarship and derives an integrated framework that demonstrates how intelligent decision-support systems (IDSSs) shape humans’ ethical decision-making. (...) In particular, we identify resulting consequences on an individual level (i.e., deliberation enhancement, motivation enhancement, autonomy enhancement and action enhancement) and on a societal level (i.e., moral deskilling, restricted moral progress and moral responsibility gaps). We carve out two distinct methods/operation types (i.e., processoriented and outcome-oriented navigation) that decision-support systems can deploy and postulate that these determine to what extent the previously stated consequences materialize. Overall, this study holds important theoretical and practical implications by establishing clarity in the conceptions, underlying mechanisms and (directions of) influences that can be expected when using particular IDSSs for ethical decisions. (shrink)

One of the central questions in the epistemology of conversational AIs is how to classify the beliefs acquired from them. Two promising candidates are instrument-based and testimony-based beliefs. However, the category of instrument-based beliefs faces an intrinsic problem, and a challenge arises in its application. On the other hand, relying solely on the category of testimony-based beliefs does not encompass the totality of our practice of using conversational AIs. To address these limitations, I propose a novel classification of beliefs that (...) shifts the focus from the properties of the conversational AIs themselves to how recipients perceive AI output, specifically whether they take the output at face value. The proposed categories are beliefs by regarding as instruments and beliefs by regarding as testifiers. By using these complementary categories, a more comprehensive understanding of beliefs acquired from conversational AIs can be achieved while avoiding the problems associated with the traditional classification. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that boredom can be an important experience that contributes to personal autonomous agency by providing authentic motivation, and that strategies of social media providers to bind users’ attention to their platforms undermine this authenticity. As discussed in social epistemology and media ethics for a while now, such strategies can lead to so-called epistemic or filter bubbles. Our analysis of the relation between boredom and social media use focuses on a similarly impairing effect of social media (...) on users’ autonomy, which we call authenticity bubbles. (shrink)

Carl Mitcham has recently pointed out that the current approach to the ethics of technology has failed to solve large-scale socio-ethical challenges in the technological world, such as climate change. He then suggests that, in the face of an iceberg of issues regarding technological development, philosophers should recognize the intellectual heritage of the classical philosophers of technology to better deal with the escalating crises that threaten humankind. While Mitcham’s proposal is inspiring, there are several lacunae in his work. In this (...) paper, we contribute to Mitcham’s idea by developing it and filling the important gaps. Our efforts have led to a new style of holistic thinking about the ethics of technology, according to which it is necessary to focus on the system of technologies as a whole (while not ignoring individual technologies, of course) to understand and address issues related to technology development. -/- . (shrink)

This chapter discusses the nature of software maintenance in light of software’s ontological status. A realist view of software need not commit us to the otiose position that software maintenance is impossible. Many philosophers and computer scientists have been concerned with drawing attention to software’s dual nature, its being both symbolic and physical, abstract and concrete. There are strong connections to be found between this topic and recent investigations in the philosophy of linguistics, particularly the metaphysics of words. It is (...) shown, contra Irmak, that software can be best understood through a realist type-token distinction employing an ontology of composite objects that was put forward by Katz. This approach employs both non-spatiotemporal abstract types and tokens of those types. Further developing Katz’s realist approach can help to make better sense of the dual nature of computational artefacts and their maintenance than the alternatives outlined. Young claims that a prevalent imbalanced view of maintenance as solely conservative is due to a misunderstanding of the nature of artefacts as being realisations of their producers’ intentions. This is a problem for theories of artefacts that employ intentions, such as the one involved with the realist view of software and software maintenance. Software maintenance on this view is not solely conservative but also adaptive and enhancive, constituting a source of counterexamples to Young’s claim. An alternative explanation of the imbalanced view is provided, based on observations by software engineers, especially Sommerville. (shrink)

What can we learn about the nature of technology by studying practices of maintenance and repair? This volume addresses this question by bringing together scholarship from philosophers of technology working at the forefront of this emerging and exciting topic. -/- The chapters in this volume explore how attending to maintenance and repair can challenge and complement existing ways of thinking about technology focused on use and design and introduce new philosophical perspectives on the relationship between technology, time and human practice. (...) They examine the significance of maintenance and repair practices at different scales in relation to a diverse range of philosophical traditions and a wide variety of technologies, from urban infrastructure such as bridges and buildings to data technologies such as servers and software systems. Together, the contributions highlight common themes in the philosophical study of maintenance, including the role of skill, the significance of social values and the potential of these practices to transform the technologies to which they are applied. By reflecting on the different ways in which we keep technologies going, from the devices we use in our homes to the large technical systems which surround us, this volume reveals the philosophical significance of practices of maintenance, not only as a source of new insights but also as a resource for enriching our understanding of a variety of existing topics in philosophy. -/- Maintenance and Philosophy of Technology will appeal to scholars and advanced students working in philosophy of technology, philosophy of engineering and science & technology studies. (shrink)

Mark Coeckelbergh starts his book with a very powerful picture based on a real incident: On the 9th of January 2020, Robert Williams was wrongfully arrested by Detroit police officers in front of his two young daughters, wife and neighbors. For 18 hours the police would not disclose the grounds for his arrest (American Civil Liberties Union 2020; Hill 2020). The decision to arrest him was primarily based on a facial detection algorithm which matched Mr. Williams’ driving license photo with (...) the picture of a man who was suspected of watch theft two years earlier. Not only did the computer ‘get it wrong’ as one of the detectives said, when Mr. Williams made them aware that the picture of the suspect obviously wasn’t resembling him, the probably unreliable algorithm very likely contributed to racial discrimination (Hill 2020). It is well documented that many available facial detection algorithms at this time had significant problems (e.g. a comparably high false positive rate) with respect to black persons, like Mr. Williams (NIST 2019). Multiple causes may exist, such as unbalanced training datasets and insufficient optimization. Coeckelbergh compares the disturbing case of Mr. Williams with a political interpretation of Franz Kafka’s The Trial, where the protagonist, Josef K., is accused of an unspecified crime by an opaque, oppressive and absurd bureaucracy: “In the 21st-century United States, Josef K. is black and is falsely accused by an algorithm, without explanation” (p. 2). (shrink)

When a major engineering product failed, a failure investigation is often conducted to prevent similar failures in the future. In this dissertation, I propose an account of the epistemology and methodology of engineering failure investigations, based on a close examination of the documentations on five major plane crash investigations conducted by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). -/- The dissertation is divided into three parts. The first part consists of the five case studies arranged in chronological order: the American Airlines (...) Flight 191 accident in 1979; the United Flight 232 accident in 1989; the United Flight 585 accident in 1991; the USAir Flight 427 accident in 1994; and the TWA Flight 800 accident in 1996. In each case study, I summarize the entire investigation process, focusing on articulating the questions that arise and the evidential reasoning that helped resolve each question. -/- The second part of the dissertation examines how the investigators infer causes of failure events. The type of causal inference used in failure investigations typically proceeds from effects to causes, hence it is called reverse causal inference. This is in contrast with forward causal inference, where researchers start with an intervention and infer the effects of that intervention. I identify three types of reverse causal inference in engineering failure investigations: feature dependence, additional outcomes, and process tracing. -/- The third part of the dissertation examines how the investigators construct narratives of failure events. At the end of each failure investigation, the investigators come up with a narrative detailing the sequence of events leading to the outcome. This part of the dissertation examines how the investigators construct such narratives and support them with evidence. I argue that both the construction and the justification of a narrative of a failure event depend on the question-and-answer process in the investigation, which I call the question dynamics of the investigation. I examine three main components of the question dynamics: the resolution of questions, the significance of questions, and the arising of questions. I conclude the dissertation with an account of the coherence of narratives, which is a measure of the evidential status of narratives. My account of coherence relies on the question dynamics, and it captures the intuitive idea that the pieces of a coherent narrative “fit together” very well. (shrink)

Engineering accident investigations are systematic inquiries into the facts and causes of engineering accidents. The aims of an engineering accident investigation include identifying significant truths about an accident, learning lessons to prevent similar future accidents, and authoritatively communicating the investigative results to the stakeholders. An important normative dimension along which an engineering accident investigation can be evaluated is its degree of success in fulfilling these aims. In this paper, I propose criteria for evaluating the degree of success of an engineering (...) accident investigation using a question-centered framework, and then argue for the relevance of this proposal to the actual engineering practice. The basic idea of my proposal is that an engineering accident investigation is successful to the extent that (1) questions that should arise in the investigation do arise, and (2) questions that arise—especially the more significant ones—are resolved satisfactorily by the end of the investigation. The first part of this paper unpacks my proposal by analyzing the following three concepts and illustrating them using examples from the TWA Flight 800 accident investigation: The (satisfactory) resolution of questions, the significance of questions, and the arising of questions. The second part of this paper argues for the relevance of my proposal to the practitioners and stakeholders of engineering accident investigations. First, I argue that my proposal is sensitive to the aims of the investigators and stakeholders regarding engineering accident investigations, and that it helps them navigate competing and conflicting aims. Second, I go beyond the TWA 800 case study and argue that my proposal explains the strengths and limitations of different types of accident causation models used in investigations. (shrink)

BARBA-KAY, Antón. A Web of Our Own Making: The Nature of Digital Formation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023. x + 295 pp. Cloth, $29.99—This is a truly remarkable book, brimming with extensive research, penetrating insight, and poetic beauty. The book’s main theme is the cultural revolution caused by digital technology. As the book shows, we have always been shaped by our tools. With new ways of doing come new ways of being human. In this way, the digital revolution is continuous (...) with previous technological revolutions. But Barba-Kay argues that digital technology also represents a new, perhaps even final, stage in the history of technology. What makes digital technology so powerful—and so dangerous—is that it is a natural technology. (shrink)

The following paper attempts to articulate a distinctly materialist notion of emergence and the formation of patterns by way of re-visiting two texts that have been considered oddities, if not embarrassments, by the subsequent developments of their respective disciplines: Freud’s Project for a Scientific Psychology and Engels’s Dialectic of Nature. Both texts are strikingly similar in their speculative engagement with the natural sciences and in their potential to inform a renewed engagement with the question of the relation between technology and (...) life. In the concept of “path-breaking” [Bahnung] Freud understands perceptions as inscribing themselves in the structure of the very perceiving apparatus through repetition of what one could call a “material trace” (Sybille Krämer). This notion of the “material trace” can be connected to the key thrust of Engels’s “objective dialectics” in that it “concerns a model of structural emergence”(Hartmut Winkler). I want to propose that these texts can potentially enrich our understanding of how mental formations such as memory take shape and how subjectivity is constituted in material processes. That is, once Freud and Engels are read through recent philosophical thinking on technology (Bernard Stiegler, Catherine Malabou) and the concept of recursivity (Yuk Hui). This approach can also supply resources for a Marxist notion of ideology—namely by performing a turn from a critique that is primarily concerned with the question of how we can penetrate false appearances towards a materialist account of how (“false”) appearances, something like “real abstractions” (Alfred Sohn-Rethel), can emerge out of the “flat plane” of matter. (shrink)

Unter den 12 Jüngern Jesu waren vier Fischer, und als Jesus sie zum ersten Mal sah, waren sie dabei, ihre Netze zu pflegen, zu waschen und zu flicken. Mit seinem Satz, sie sollten ihm folgen, denn er wolle sie zu Menschenfischern machen, verbindet Jesus die bisherige Tätigkeit der Fischer mit ihrem zukünftigen Leben als Jünger und Apostel, als Kern der jungen Christengemeinde. Das Netz der Fischer ist dabei weniger ein Gleichnis für ein Werkzeug, mit dem man Fische überlisten kann um (...) sie zu fangen und zu verspeisen, das Netz hält etwas zusammen, wenn es denn gepflegt und an schwachen Stellen immer wieder geflickt wird. Das Netz ist etwas, das unter der Benutzung verschleißt, und es muss, in Stunden der Ruhe, gepflegt werden. Wenn wir heute vom Vernetzt- Sein sprechen und sagen, dass wir unser Netzwerk pflegen müssen, wenn wir uns fragen, ob wir vernetzt sind oder uns verheddert haben, dann meinen wir etwas ganz anderes, als das, was mit dem Fischernetz im Evangelium angesprochen ist. Ich möchte diesen Unterschied deutlich machen und zeigen, dass das Vernetzt-Sein wie es uns heute im Internet, aber auch außerhalb der so genannten Sozialen Medien oder sozialen Netzwerke, begegnet, eben keine notwendige Lebensbedingung des Menschen ist, dass wir nicht etwa schon immer das Streben nach Vernetzung in uns getragen haben, jedenfalls nicht in der Form, wie wir es heute im Internet betreiben. (shrink)

periphery looks at you with hate. This phrase in red neon struck the visitors of Landscapes, an exhibition by Domenico Antonio Mancini in the Lia Rumma Gallery in Naples, in 2019. It was not addressed to the public but to the nineteenth-century pictorial views relocated in the last room of the exhibition, as if repainted by the immaterial vandalism of the colored light. The exhibition’s theme was the visibility of contemporary suburban environments, now accessible through Google street view visualizations. Mancini’s (...) non-representational Landscapes are Google addresses, not aesthetically appreciable but pragmatically challenging: the visitor must type on a touch screen to access to the outskirts of Naples, Palermo, Catania, Rome and Milan. The words at the end of the exhibition almost literally replicated a black graffiti drawn on Palazzo Missori in Milan. Are these relocation and remediation just about artification? What happens when, browsing Google street view, I take a close look at that graffiti recalling the political protests during the streets the 1960s? The deictic transitability in space and time of the hypermediated image can activate a fortuitous narrative and an open interpretation by looking back on the present as if it were past. Even a digital landscape is a moral landscape like that of public art for Danto, with a «internal beauty» whose meaning is not already embodied in architectural and artistic media but accessible and shareable through our portable devices. (shrink)

Digital innovations are rapidly changing the contemporary workplace. Big Tech companies marketing algorithmic management increasingly decide on the Future of Work. Political responses, however, often focus on managing the impact of these technologies on workers. They leave the question of how these technologies are designed or how workers can determine their own futures unanswered. This approach risks surrendering the Future of Work debate to techno-determinist imaginaries aligned with corporate interests. Using Cornelius Castoriadis’ early writings on worker struggles in French Tayloristic (...) factories and his later oeuvre on conflictual social imaginaries, I propose an agonistic approach to the Future of Work. Not merely companies implementing workplace technologies, but also workers themselves possess agency in determining the Future of Work. Workers’ frequent contestations against machinic surveillance and technologically mediated coordination of the labour process disclose an alternative Future of Work in which technologies are used to enhance worker autonomy rather than bureaucratic control. Worker struggles at Amazon Mechanical Turk illustrate this agonistic dynamic: Amazon mobilizes algorithmic management to fragment and control a workforce of globally dispersed remote workers, but the latter form online social communities and create counter-technologies to reappropriate control over the labour process. (shrink)

Our research pays attention to the problem of the coverage of the realm of semiotic beings. This problem is raised by the meeting between the contemporary account of the human animal as a semiotic animal and the possible advent of a technological singularity, meaning a living technological being aware of semiosis. Apart from highlighting the prospective emergence of a complex phenomenon leading to evolutionary pressures on humans, we also pointed to a positive direction towards the development of a cooperative relationship (...) between the latter and a sustainable form of technological life: the furtherance of semiotics. To this end, we started by providing a few historical and philosophical references to help us better understand the problem at stake. Next, we described the way in which beings gain semiotic access to reality, the distinction between the realm of semiotic beings and of machines, and the infinite character of the study of semiotics. Finally, we concluded that the realm of semiotic beings is still, despite technological advances, exclusively human. (shrink)

In the past few years, calls for integrating ethics modules in engineering curricula have multiplied. Despite this positive trend, a number of issues with these ‘embedded’ programs remains. First, learning goals are underspecified. A second limitation is the conflation of different dimensions under the same banner, in particular confusion between ethics curricula geared towards addressing the ethics of individual conduct and curricula geared towards addressing ethics at the societal level. In this article, we propose a tripartite framework to overcome these (...) difficulties. Our framework analytically decomposes an ethics module into three dimensions. First, there is the ethical dimension, which pertains to the learning goals. Second, there is the moral dimension, which addresses the moral relevance of engineers’ conduct. Finally, there is the political dimension, which scales up issues of moral relevance at the civic level. All in all, our framework has two advantages. First, it provides analytic clarity, i.e. it enables course instructors to locate ethical dilemmas in either the moral or political realm and to make use of the tools and resources from moral and/or political philosophy. Second, it depicts a comprehensive ethical training, which enables students to both reason about moral issues in the abstract, and to socially contextualize potential solutions. (shrink)

This article explores the potential of Bernard Lonergan’s philosophy of subjectivity as objectivity as a grounding for value sensitive design (VSD) and the design turn in applied ethics. The rapid pace of scientific and technological advancement has created a gap between technical abilities and our moral assessments of those abilities, calling for a reflection on the philosophical tools we have for applying ethics. In particular, applied ethics often presents interconnected problems that require a more general framework for ethical reflection. Lonergan’s (...) philosophy, which emphasizes the importance of self-understanding and self-transcendence in achieving objectivity, can provide a valuable perspective on VSD and the design turn in applied ethics. The article examines how Lonergan’s philosophy can be applied to VSD and the design turn, and how scientific knowledge can be integrated into an ethics of science without reducing it to an external reflection. By adopting Lonergan’s perspective, we can address the ethical challenges arising from scientific and technological advancements while promoting a more holistic approach to applied ethics. (shrink)

This paper takes up the question of how videographic public announcements (VPAs)---i.e. videos that a wide swath of the public sees and knows that everyone else can see too--- have functioned to mobilize people politically, and how the presence of deepfakes in our information environment stands to change the dynamics of this mobilization. Existing work by Regina Rini, Don Fallis and others has focused on the ways that deepfakes might interrupt our acquisition of first-order knowledge through videos. But I point (...) out that even where every audience member takes a video to be veridical, where first-order knowledge acquisition is secure, an audience aware of deepfakes in their environment will not acquire higher order knowledge in the way that has erstwhile been characteristic for audiences of VPAs. Engaging with ideas from the literatures on public announcement logic, common knowledge, and convention, I enumerate a variety of ways in which we should expect this absence of higher order knowledge to throw up barriers to political mobilization. I go on to apply my analysis of VPAs to the mechanisms by which an uptick in publicly available videos of police brutality over the last decade, mediated by camera phones and social media, was responsible for the largest mass protests in US history in summer 2020. This makes vivid the stakes of the transformation in our mobilizing environment that I've claimed deepfakes effect: where we lose the common-knowledge-generating effects of VPAs, there are fresh obstacles to this sort of mass mobilization. (shrink)

In the science and values literature, scholars have shown how science is influenced and shaped by values, often in opposition to the ‘value free’ ideal of science. In this paper, we aim to contribute to the science and values literature by showing that the relation between science and values flows not only from values into scientific practice, but also from (allegedly neutral) science to values themselves. The extant literature in the ‘science and values’ field focuses by and large on reconstructing, (...) post hoc, how values have influenced science; our reconstruction of the case studies, instead, aims to show that scientific concepts and methods _too, because of specific identifiable characteristics,_ can promote some values rather than (or at the expense of) others. We explain this bidirectional relation in analogy to debates on the normativity of technical artifacts and on feminist approaches in science, and we illustrate our claims with cases from the health sciences and machine learning. While our arguments in this paper also draw on post hoc reconstructions, we intend to show where, in the science in the making, we should engage not only with the question whether a practice is value-laden, but also how specific conceptual and methodological choices can influence values down the road. All in all, these considerations expand the ways in which philosophers can contribute to more value-aware scientific practices. (shrink)

Technological determinism, as a position on the nature and effects of technology/technologies can be divided into optimistic and critical forms. The optimistic variety, of which contemporary cyber-utopianism is an instance, holds that the development of technology shapes or at least facilitates ameliorative alterations in society. The critical variety, on the other hand, tends to problematise or condemn the positive narrative of technological impact on human existence. Whilst the optimistic form still retains some academic credibility, especially concerning digital technologies, the critical (...) variety tends to be viewed as reductionist, essentialist and pessimistic. Furthermore, the fact that many of its leading proponents base their critiques on the analysis of industrial technology, reinforces the impression that critical technological determinism is outdated. I argue that focussing on the specific forms of technology analysed by classic technological determinists is to miss the key point of their arguments. Critical determinism warns that with the increasing integration of technology into everyday life, we run the risk of idealising technological organisation and making sociotechnical relations a model for all social relations. Drawing upon Rendueles’s (2017) analysis of the sociophobic tendencies of the online public sphere, I argue for the continuing relevance of so-called ‘Classic’ technological determinism. The danger posed by the ubiquity of the internet on this account is not that it possesses some innate quality that imposes a particular social pattern on humanity, but that the way in which we interact in cyberspace becomes the norm for social relations outside the cybersphere. (shrink)

Background: The use of digital technology in higher education is overwhelmingly positively assessed in most recent research literature. While some literature indicates certain challenges in this regard, in general, the emphasis is on an encouragement and promotion of digital technology in higher education. While we recognised the positive potential of the use of digital technology in higher education, we were cautious of an instrumentalist and disembodied understanding of (digital) technology and its potential impact on higher education – as a sector (...) of education and as a body of students. Aim: To re-conceptualise the way in which technology is understood for its use in the higher education sector, as is argued, would be of benefit for transformation in higher education. Setting: South African Higher Education sector. Methods: Phenomenology of embodiment. Results: An embodied understanding of technology through the embodied phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and an explication of its potential for transformation in higher education via the working concept of the Embodied Screen leads to a full understanding of the student as embodied and socially-embedded individual. Conclusion: A more holistic and embodied understanding of digital technology serves to supplement transformation in higher education, especially if transformation is itself understood in concrete social and bodily terms as is the case in the South African context. (shrink)

“La obra que usted está examinando es el primer estudio de todas las facetas de la tecnología, desde la concepción del artefacto hasta los problemas filosóficos y jurídicos que suscitan el saber y el hacer tecnológicos… Además, Raynaud califica de tóxica para la propia tecnología a la política utilitarista de dar prioridad al ‘desarrollo’ por sobre la investigación básica, ya que todas las innovaciones tecnológicas han utilizado conocimientos básicos… El utilitarismo que pregonan los economistas neoclásicos y los estadistas miopes es (...) el peor peligro que enfrenta la tecnología, la que languidece sin el apoyo de las ciencias básicas. Como decía Guido Beck, mi maestro de física, no han entendido que no puede haber leche de vaca sin vaca”. – Mario Bunge . (shrink)

Digital artifacts — humanly-constructed items that inhabit our computers and networks — suffer an unfortunate reputation as being virtual and therefore unreal, and all too easy to reproduce on the cheap. These features together prompt the question of this article: if digital artifacts can be reproduced for free, and if they are unreal, why do they have economic value at all? Using a focal case study of bitcoin — the most unreal digital artifact of them all, and one that has (...) been copied and pasted a thousand times over — I answer the question. Some digital artifacts can't be copied on the cheap, as it turns out, and they are real enough to be useful. (shrink)

2019 Applied Technology Award for the Media and the Moving Image Awards at University of Houston. -/- The Google algorithm, as a ranking and ordering structure, cannot be “objective” as long as the page-ranking mechanism produces social effects and always inadvertently and inescapably affects social priorities. Imitable units of information (memes) on the internet change according to the laws of exponential growth, like other social phenomena, which include Google rankings. Mathematically and graphically represented, the effects of mimetic inflation on Google (...) rankings and other site-specific information can be proposed and projected. Current algorithmic policies may actually preserve and exaggerate the social priorities of the status quo in spite of “objective” intentions. These considerations in mind, the concept of “monology”, “the monopoly on information”, might be implemented to further analyze network effects online. Algorithmic regulation could be used to enforce artificial inequalities, to permit natural inequalities, or to enforce artificial equalities: each option has implications for the justice and fairness of online and offline environments. (shrink)

This article examines how Facebook’s Feed, its dynamic user interface, incorporates and refashions the capacity to temporalize cultural material and experience that has classically been attributed to subjectivity. I problematize the ambiguous historicity of digital culture across the experience of the ordinary that it produces by arranging the subjective time and ‘ruined’ bits of cultural material into algorithmic timelines. Drawing on recent media theory, I underscore the irreducible alienness of algorithmic temporalizations, which undermine habitual normalization. I show subjectivity moves beyond (...) identity and narrative closure through an unconscious affective investment in extremely popular algorithmic timelines. (shrink)

Religious perspectives, myth, and magic are not merely evocative lenses by which to understand the work done by algorithms and "AI" in the present day- though they are indeed that. And they're not merely the historical underpinnings of the practices of technology in general and the dream of "AI" in particular- though they are that, too. Rather, these elements resonate and recur throughout the past and present practice of "AI" development-and those practices then act as new inputs, foundations, tinting lenses (...) from and through which those systems and artifacts learn. These are ways of living in the world which don't simply exist at the margins or the periphery of our social interactions -rather they're foundational and central to the goals, the aims, the practice of these techno-scientific projects, and especially "AI." Indeed, these religious foundations are crucial to our understanding in a way that is often under-interrogated -not to say uninterrogated. -/- While social scientists and humanities scholars increasingly point to the role belief plays in "AI," social and experiential knowledges are still among the most difficult things to get technoscientific researchers to consider as knowledge at all, much less discuss and account for. Many still feel that values and religious beliefs are and should be separate from technoscientific inquiry. I argue, however, that by engaging in both the magico-religious valences and the lived experiential expertise of marginalized people, "AI" and other technological systems can be better understood, and their harms anticipated and curtailed. (shrink)

This Open Peer Commentary on “A Critical Cybernetics” by Klaus Krippendorff outlines that enacting alternative not-yet existing realities goes beyond discourse and can be considered design practice. A Critical Cybernetics for enacting alternative not-yet existing realities, such as Krippendorff proposed, would benefit from associating itself with the expertise in the technicity of society that has been central to cybernetics since its inception.

The negative impacts of social media have given rise to philosophical questions around whether social media companies have the authority to regulate user-generated content on their platforms. The most popular justification for that authority is to appeal to private ownership rights. Social media companies own their platforms, and their ownership comes with various rights that ground their authority to moderate user-generated content on their platforms. However, we argue that ownership rights can be limited when their exercise results in significant harms (...) to others or the perpetration of injustices. We outline some of the substantive harms that social media platforms inflict through their practices of content moderation and some of the procedural injustices that arise through their arbitrary application of community guidelines. This provides a normative basis for calls to better regulate user-generated content on social media platforms. We conclude by considering some of the political and legal implications of our argument. (shrink)

This paper explores how the social and affective lives of people with marginalized social identities are particularly affected by digital influences. Specifically, the paper examines whether and how social media enables LGBTQ+ people to experience feelings of belonging. It does so by drawing on literature from digital epistemology and phenomenology of the digital, and by presenting and analyzing the results of a qualitative study consisting of 25 interviews with LGBTQ+ people. The interviews were conducted to explore the social media experiences (...) of LGBTQ+ people through an empirical framework informed by both phenomenology and social epistemology, particularly feminist standpoint theory. The paper emphasizes the importance of positionality and the epistemic value of research that centers marginalized perspectives and employs an anti-oppressive research approach, and focuses on understanding the digital experiences of LGBTQ+ people from within their marginalized perspective. (shrink)

As algorithms have become ubiquitous in consequential domains, societal concerns about the potential for discriminatory outcomes have prompted urgent calls to address algorithmic bias. In response, a rich literature across computer science, law, and ethics is rapidly proliferating to advance approaches to designing fair algorithms. Yet computer scientists, legal scholars, and ethicists are often not speaking the same language when using the term ‘bias.’ Debates concerning whether society can or should tackle the problem of algorithmic bias are hampered by conflations (...) of various understandings of bias, ranging from neutral deviations from a standard to morally problematic instances of injustice due to prejudice, discrimination, and disparate treatment. This terminological confusion impedes efforts to address clear cases of discrimination. -/- In this paper, we examine the promises and challenges of different approaches to disambiguating bias and designing for justice. While both approaches aid in understanding and addressing clear algorithmic harms, we argue that they also risk being leveraged in ways that ultimately deflect accountability from those building and deploying these systems. Applying this analysis to recent examples of generative AI, our argument highlights unseen dangers in current methods of evaluating algorithmic bias and points to ways to redirect approaches to addressing bias in generative AI at its early stages in ways that can more robustly meet the demands of justice. (shrink)

The study aims to expose vulnerabilities of the subject-object paradigm in modern philosophy. The article concentrates upon ontological limitations of the concept of a subject and changing the status of an object in subject-object relations in the context of changing characteristics of the object existence. Scientific novelty of the work lies in identifying points of ontological stability and limitations of the subject concept, which could be used in its further theoretical development. As a result of the research, the aspects necessary, (...) from the author’s viewpoint, for building a theoretical model of the modern subject, which would be based on ontological symbiosis of subjective and objective characteristics, are determined. (shrink)

Value can be understood, analyzed, and created in various ways. In addition to more pragmatic modes of valorization, there are “ontological” processes that can be understood to increase value, which will refer as ontological valorization and progressively unpack. Ontological valorization generally works as a foundation for pragmatic valorization. David Graeber has pointed out that value rises out of a system of relations, and this is the level of ontological valorization. In this chapter, the authors explore ontological valorization for possibilities of (...) transformation at this foundational level. They explore the possibilities represented by blockchain technologies for both ontological and pragmatic valorization. The authors argue and try to show that, even with its present-day limitations and problems, the technology's innovativeness lies in its ability to create a foundation for ontological valorization, though not necessarily in certain practical applications per se. (shrink)

Value capture occurs when an agent’s values are rich and subtle; they enter a social environment that presents simplified — typically quantified — versions of those values; and those simplified articulations come to dominate their practical reasoning. Examples include becoming motivated by FitBit’s step counts, Twitter Likes and Re-tweets, citation rates, ranked lists of best schools, and Grade Point Averages. We are vulnerable to value capture because of the competitive advantage that such crisp and clear expressions of value have in (...) our private reasoning and our public justification. There is, however, a price. In value capture, we take a central component of our autonomy — our ongoing deliberation over the exact articulation of our values — and we outsource it. And the metrics to which we outsource usually engineered for the interests of some external force, like a large-scale institution’s interest in cross-contextual comprehensibility and quick aggregability. That outsourcing cuts off one of the key benefits to personal deliberation. In value capture, we no longer adjust our values and their articulations in light of own rich experience of the world. Our values should often be carefully tailored to our particular selves or our small-scale communities, but in value capture, we buy our values off the rack. In some cases – like decreasing CO2 emissions – the costs of non-tailored values are outweighed by the benefit of precise collective coordination. In other cases, like in our aesthetic lives, they are not. This suggests that we should want different values suited to different scales. We should want value federalism. Some values are perhaps best pursued at the largest-scale level, others at smaller scales. The problem occurs when we exhibit an excess preference for the largest-scale values – when we consistently let the universal metrics swamp our quieter interests. (shrink)

This volume highlights interdisciplinary research on the ethical, metaphysical, and experimental dimensions of extended reality technologies, including virtual and augmented realities. It explores themes connected to the nature of virtual objects, the value of virtual experiences and relationships, experimental ethics, moral psychology in the metaverse, and game/simulation design. -/- Extended reality (XR) refers to a family of technologies aiming to augment (AR) or virtually replace (VR) human experience. The chapters in this volume represent cutting-edge research on XR experiences from a (...) wide range of approaches including philosophy, psychology, Africana studies, and cognitive sciences. They are organized around three guiding questions. Part 1, “What is Extended Reality?”, contains a series of chapters examining metaphysical questions about virtual objects, actions, and worlds. Part 2, “Is There an Ethics for Extended Realities?”, includes chapters that address ethical questions that arise within XR experiences. Finally, Part 3, “What Can We Do with Extended Realities?”, features chapters from a diverse group of social scientists on the potential uses of XR as an investigative and educational tool, including its strengths and pitfalls. (shrink)

This paper clarifies and answers the following question: is technology morally neutral? It is argued that the debate between proponents and opponents of the Neutrality Thesis depends on different underlying assumptions about the nature of technological artifacts. My central argument centres around the claim that a mere physicalistic vocabulary does not suffice in characterizing technological artifacts as artifacts, and that the concepts of function and intention are necessary to describe technological artifacts at the right level of description. Once this has (...) been established, I demystify talk about the possible value-ladenness of technological artifacts by showing how these values can be empirically identified. I draw from examples in biology and the social sciences to show that there is a non-mysterious sense in which functions and values can be empirically identified. I conclude from this that technology can be value-laden and that its value-ladenness can both derive from the intended functions as well as the harmful non-intended functions of technological artifacts. (shrink)

This paper presents a novel theory of artifact functions, drawing from persistence-based accounts of social functions, according to which the function of an artifact consists in those of its effects that contribute to the persistence of its kind. First, the paper argues that artifact functions have an underacknowledged “interventionist task”: functional ascriptions have implications for the ways that users have reason to use technologies, and how they have reason to intervene when technologies have undesired effects. Then, it argues that the (...) ways that users have reason to use technologies and intervene are informed by the present persistence conditions of artifact kinds. It is therefore useful to incorporate these persistence conditions into the artifacts’ functions. By focusing on the social and political embedding of artifacts, the theory also allows for fruitful connections between the theory of artifacts, the political philosophy of technology, and the literature on functions in the philosophy of social science. (shrink)

In his article ‘The Metaverse: Surveillant Physics, Virtual Realist Governance, and the Missing Commons,’ Andrew McStay addresses an entwinement of ethical, political, and metaphysical concerns surrounding the Metaverse, arguing that the Metaverse is not being designed to further the public good but is instead being created to serve the plutocratic ends of technology corporations. He advances the notion of ‘surveillant physics’ to capture this insight and introduces the concept of ‘virtual realist governance’ as a theoretical framework that ought to guide (...) Metaverse design and regulation. This commentary article primarily serves as a supplementary piece rather than a direct critique of McStay’s work. First, I flag certain understated or overlooked nuances in McStay’s discussion. Then, I extend McStay’s discussion by juxtaposing a Lockean inspired argument supporting the property rights of Metaverse creators with an opposing argument advocating for a Metaverse user's ‘right to virtual abundance,’ informed by the potential of virtual reality technology to eliminate scarcity in virtual worlds. Contrasting these arguments highlights the tension between corporate rights and social justice in the governance of virtual worlds and bears directly on McStay’s assertion that there is a problem of the missing commons in the early design of the Metaverse. (shrink)

I argue that ML models used in science function as highly idealized toy models. If we treat ML models as a type of highly idealized toy model, then we can deploy standard representational and epistemic strategies from the toy model literature to explain why ML models can still provide epistemic success despite their lack of similarity to their targets.

This paper presents an alternative model to the rule-following model of social practices and draws implications for the possibility of integrating robots into the social realm. We differentiate between “maximally loose” and “maximally rigid” forms of social practices and show that especially the latter pose a problem for social robotics. Not only is it a technical challenge to enable robots to function like human agents in loose practices, but it can also lead to normative problems. Namely, on the one hand, (...) social robots may cause loose social practices to become too rigid; on the other hand, they present us with the problem that we would have to recognize robots as co-authors of our social practices or even as persons. (shrink)

In this chapter, I sketch a philosophical framework of shared and diverging worlds and cultural significance. Although the framework proposed is basically a psychologically informed, philosophical approach, it is explicitly aimed at being applicable for agent-based social simulations. The account consists of three parts: (1) a formal ontology of human worlds, (2) an analysis of the pre-semantic significance of the objects of human worlds, and (3) an account of what it means for agents to share a world (or to live (...) in diverging worlds). In this chapter, I will give a brief and concise summary of my account. At the end, I will briefly outline how the proposed framework might be put to use for multiagent social simulation of complex social interaction scenarios involving diverging (cultural) backgrounds. (shrink)

This paper serves a dual function: (1) it is intended to proffer a stable understanding of our digital engagement on the Internet as a form of labor that is co-opted by digital firms for private profit; (2) it extends the concept of participatory democracy to our digital world, arguing that our collective or common production of value for digital firms (in the form of what I call“knowledge goods”) requires the implementation of participatory democratic governance mechanisms over these digital firms and (...) the experimentation with democratic digital alternatives.Whereas others have argued in favor of democratic control over digital platforms on the basis of the power that digital firms have over user's lives (Engelmann et al.,2020), this paper adds to this discussion by arguing in favor of digital platform democratization based on the value-generating labor contributed by digital users. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic led to social restrictions that often prevented us from hugging the ones we love. This absence helped some realize just how important these interactions are to our sense of care and connection. Many turned to digitally mediated social interactions to address these absences, but often unsatisfactorily. Some theorists might blame this on the disembodied character of our digital spaces, e.g., that interpersonal touch is excluded from our lives online. However, others continued to find care and connection in (...) their digitally mediated interactions despite not being able to touch. Inspired by such contrasting cases, we ask if ‘digital hugs’ can work? We use the Mixed Reality Interaction Matrix to examine hugging as a social practice. This leads us to several claims about the nature of our embodied social interactions and their digital mediation: (1) all social interaction is mediated; (2) all virtual experiences are embodied; (3) technology has become richer and more supportive of embodiment; and (4) expertise plays a role. These claims help make the case that quality social connections online are substantially dependent upon the dynamic skilful resourcing of multiple mediating components, what we term digital tact. By introducing and developing this concept, we hope to contribute to a better understanding of our digital embodied sociality and the possibilities for caring connections online. (shrink)

Abstract of of the anthology: Digitalisation encompasses all areas of life and is thus also relevant for theology and the Church. This is not just about the possible uses of social media; in this anthology, digitalisation is understood as a phenomenon that shapes society, the Church and theology with the help of various technologies, such as artificial intelligence. In this context, theology and the Church represent places of digitalisation on the one hand, and, at the same time, the discourse on (...) digitalisation can be advanced with the help of theological thinking on the other. This anthology is both theologically ecumenical and is anchored in an international context. The editors' research focus is on ethics. -/- With contributions by: Aaron J. Butler, Heide A. Campbell, Michael Fuchs, Stephen Garner, David J. Gunkel, Florian Höhne, Markus Huppenbauer, Peter G. Kirchschläger, Birte Platow, Raphael Salvi, Thomas Schlag, Peter Seele, Gotlind Ulshöfer, Joachim Wiemeyer and Lukas Zapf. (shrink)

New technological advancements have always changed the way society and human relationships work. New affordances created by technological tools inevitable modify and affect the way people interact with such tools, as well as with one another, and with the world within which this technology is embedded. -/- Technology, Users and Uses explores and discusses ethical issues around the use of technology and AI, by focusing on the way they affect individual, social and global interactions. The collection addresses topics including social (...) networks, public opinion, fake news and information warfare; digitalisation and datafication of society and individuals; and transhumanism, super-intelligent machines and the technological singularity. -/- Technology, Users and Uses aims to offer theoretical and practical guidelines and recommendations for regulators, developers, engineers and scientists, as well as for researchers, educators and scholars in the fields of technology and AI, philosophy and sociology. (shrink)

With the passage and implementation of the “first-to-file” provisions of the America Invents Act of 2011, the U.S. patent system must rely more than ever before on patent documents for its own ontological commitments concerning the existence of claimed kinds of useful objects and processes. This Article provides a comprehensive description of the previously unrecognized function of the patent document in incurring and securing warrants to these ontological commitments, and the respective roles of legal doctrines and practices in the patent (...) system’s ontological project. Among other contributions, the resulting metaphysical account serves to reconcile competing interpretations of the written description requirement that have emerged from the Federal Circuit’s recent jurisprudence, and to explain why the patent system is willing and able to examine, grant and enforce claims reciting theoretical entities. While this Article is entirely descriptive, it concludes by identifying promising normative and prescriptive implications of this work, including the formulation of an appropriate test for the patent-eligibility of software-implemented inventions in the post-Bilski era. (shrink)