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26“Alexa, define empowerment”: voice assistants at home, appropriation and technoperformancesJournal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society 19 (2): 299-312. 2021.Purpose This paper aims to show how the production of meaning is a matter of people interacting with technologies, throughout their appropriation and in co-performances. The researchers rely on the case of household-based voice assistants that endorse speaking as a primary mode of interaction with technologies. By analyzing the ethical significance of voice assistants as co-producers of moral meaning intervening in the material and socio-cultural space of the home, the paper invites their inform…Read more
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29Earth, Technology, Language: A Contribution to Holistic and Transcendental Revisions After the Artifactual TurnFoundations of Science 27 (1): 259-270. 2021.The empirical turn, understood as a turn to the artifact in the work of Ihde, has been a fruitful one, which has rightly abandoned what Serres and Latour call “the empire of signs” of the postmoderns. However, this has unfortunately implied too little attention for language and its relation to technology. The same can be said about the social dimension of technology use, which is largely neglected in postphenomenology. This talk critically responds to Ihde and Stiegler, and sketches a Wittgenste…Read more
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67Should We Treat Teddy Bear 2.0 as a Kantian Dog? Four Arguments for the Indirect Moral Standing of Personal Social Robots, with Implications for Thinking About Animals and Humans (review)Minds and Machines 31 (3): 337-360. 2020.The use of autonomous and intelligent personal social robots raises questions concerning their moral standing. Moving away from the discussion about direct moral standing and exploring the normative implications of a relational approach to moral standing, this paper offers four arguments that justify giving indirect moral standing to robots under specific conditions based on some of the ways humans—as social, feeling, playing, and doubting beings—relate to them. The analogy of “the Kantian dog” …Read more
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16Regulation or Responsibility? Autonomy, Moral Imagination, and EngineeringScience, Technology, and Human Values 31 (3): 237-260. 2006.A prima facie analysis suggests that there are essentially two, mutually exclusive, ways in which risk arising from engineering design can be managed: by imposing external constraints on engineers or by engendering their feelings of responsibility and respect their autonomy. The author discusses the advantages and disadvantages of both approaches. However, he then shows that this opposition is a false one and that there is no simple relation between regulation and autonomy. Furthermore, the auth…Read more
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74A humanoid robot named ‘Sophia’ has sparked controversy since it has been given citizenship and has done media performances all over the world. The company that made the robot, Hanson Robotics, has touted Sophia as the future of artificial intelligence. Robot scientists and philosophers have been more pessimistic about its capabilities, describing Sophia as a sophisticated puppet or chatbot. Looking behind the rhetoric about Sophia’s citizenship and intelligence and going beyond recent discussio…Read more
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The Postdigital in Pandemic Times: A Comment on the Covid-19 Crisis and its Political EpistemologiesPostdigital Science and Education 1112123 (online). 2020.
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150AI EthicsThe MIT Press. 2020.Artificial intelligence powers Google’s search engine, enables Facebook to target advertising, and allows Alexa and Siri to do their jobs. AI is also behind self-driving cars, predictive policing, and autonomous weapons that can kill without human intervention. These and other AI applications raise complex ethical issues that are the subject of ongoing debate. This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series offers an accessible synthesis of these issues. Written by a philosopher of techn…Read more
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91Introduction to Philosophy of TechnologyOxford University Press. 2019.Addressing the technological opportunities and challenges of the 21st century, Introduction to Philosophy of Technology offers the most up-to-date and comprehensive overview of philosophy of technology available. It covers several of the classic theories and approaches, but also moves beyond them to explore a broader range of theories and a number of new dynamics in the field, including responding to new technological developments. Esteemed scholar Mark Coeckelbergh emphasizes how new technologi…Read more
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37Technoperformances: using metaphors from the performance arts for a postphenomenology and posthermeneutics of technology useAI and Society 35 (3): 557-568. 2020.Postphenomenology and posthermeneutics as initiated by Ihde have made important contributions to conceptualizing understanding human–technology relations. However, their focus on individual perception, artifacts, and static embodiment has its limitations when it comes to understanding the embodied use of technology as involving bodily movement, social, and taking place within, and configuring, a temporal horizon. To account for these dimensions of experience, action, and existence with technolog…Read more
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181Artificial Intelligence, Responsibility Attribution, and a Relational Justification of ExplainabilityScience and Engineering Ethics 26 (4): 2051-2068. 2020.This paper discusses the problem of responsibility attribution raised by the use of artificial intelligence technologies. It is assumed that only humans can be responsible agents; yet this alone already raises many issues, which are discussed starting from two Aristotelian conditions for responsibility. Next to the well-known problem of many hands, the issue of “many things” is identified and the temporal dimension is emphasized when it comes to the control condition. Special attention is given …Read more
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35Wittgenstein and Philosophy of TechnologyTechné: Research in Philosophy and Technology 22 (3): 287-295. 2018.
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17This article has already been published in Techné : Research in Philosophy and Technology, 19:3, pp. 358–380.: This article explores the relevance of Georg Simmel's phenomenology of money and interpretation of modernity for understanding and evaluating contemporary financial information and communication technologies. It reads Simmel as a philosopher of technology and phenomenologist whose view of money as a medium, a “pure” tool, and a social institution can - Sociologie – Nouvel article
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68Why Care About Robots? Empathy, Moral Standing, and the Language of SufferingKairos 20 (1): 141-158. 2018.This paper tries to understand the phenomenon that humans are able to empathize with robots and the intuition that there might be something wrong with “abusing” robots by discussing the question regarding the moral standing of robots. After a review of some relevant work in empirical psychology and a discussion of the ethics of empathizing with robots, a philosophical argument concerning the moral standing of robots is made that questions distant and uncritical moral reasoning about entities’ pr…Read more
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15The art of living with ICTsFoundations of Science 22 (2): 339-348. 2017.This essay shows that a sharp distinction between ethics and aesthetics is unfruitful for thinking about how to live well with technologies, and in particular for understanding and evaluating how we cope with human existential vulnerability, which is crucially mediated by the development and use of technologies such as electronic ICTs. It is argued that vulnerability coping is a matter of ethics and art: it requires developing a kind of art and techne in the sense that it always involves technol…Read more
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Too close to kill, too far to talkIn Ronald Leenes & Eleni Kosta (eds.), Bridging Distances in Technology and Regulation, Wolf Legal Publishers. pp. 125-133. 2013.Like other teletechnological practices, drone fighting as remote fighting gives rise to a paradox with regard to the relation between ethics and distance: on the one hand, it bridges physical distance in the sense that it enables spying on people and killing people in other parts of the world. On the other hand, it seems to increase moral distance: if you are far away from your target, it becomes easier to kill. However, based on interviews with drone crew as published in the media, I show that …Read more
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Talking to RobotsOn the Linguistic Construction of Personal Human-Robot Relations. 2011.How should we make sense of 'personal' human-robot relations, given that many people view robots as 'mere machines'? This paper proposes that we understand human-robot relations from a phenomenological view as social relations in which robots are constructed as quasi-others. It is argued that language mediates in this construction. Responding to research by Turkle and others, it is shown that our talking to robots reveals a shift from an impersonal third-person to a personal second-person perspe…Read more
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41The public thingTechné: Research in Philosophy and Technology 13 (3): 175-181. 2009.Is there a politics of artifacts, and if so, what does it mean? Defining the issue as a problem about the relation between the human and the non-human, I argue that our common philosophical concepts bar us from an adequate understanding of this problem. Using the work of Hannah Arendt and Bruno Latour, I explore an escape route that involves a radical redefinition of the social. But the cost of this solution is high: we would lose the metaphysical foundation for our belief in the absolute value …Read more
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Robotic Appearances and Forms of LifeIn Michael Funk & Bernhard Irrgang (eds.), Robotics in Germany and Japan, Peter Lang Edition. pp. 59-68. 2014.
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Care robots, Virtual Virtue, and the Best Possible LifeIn Philip Brey, Adam Briggle & Edward Spence (eds.), The Good Life in a Technological Age, Routledge. pp. 281-292. 2012.
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2How to Build a Supervised Autonomous System for Robot-Enhanced Therapy for Children with Autism Spectrum DisorderPaladyn : Journal of Behavioral Robotics 8 (1): 18-38. 2017.Robot-Assisted Therapy has successfully been used to improve social skills in children with autism spectrum disorders through remote control of the robot in so-calledWizard of Oz paradigms.However, there is a need to increase the autonomy of the robotboth to lighten the burden on human therapists and to provide a consistent therapeutic experience. This paper seeks to provide insight into increasing the autonomy level of social robots in therapy to move beyond WoZ. With the final aim of improved …Read more
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7AfterwordIn Satay Sundar Sethy (ed.), Contemporary Ethical Issues in Engineering, Engineering Science Reference. pp. 274-276. 2015.
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9Regulation or responsibility?Science, Technology and Human Values 31 (3): 237-260. 2006.A prima facie analysis suggests that there are essentially two, mutually exclusive, ways in which risk arising from engineering design can be managed: by imposing external constraints on engineers or by engendering their feelings of responsibility and respect their autonomy. The author discusses the advantages and disadvantages of both approaches. However, he then shows that this opposition is a false one and that there is no simple relation between regulation and autonomy. Furthermore, the auth…Read more
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Is gesture knowledge?In Helena de Preester (ed.), Moving Imagination, John Benjamins. pp. 113-131. 2013.
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36Humans, Animals, and RobotsInternational Journal of Social Robotics 3 (2): 197-204. 2011.This paper argues that our understanding of many human-robot relations can be enhanced by comparisons with human-animal relations and by a phenomenological approach which highlights the significance of how robots appear to humans. Some potential gains of this approach are explored by discussing the concept of alterity, diversity and change in human-robot relations, Heidegger's claim that animals are 'poor in world', and the issue of robot-animal relations. These philosophical reflections result …Read more
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19Computer games, education, and the good lifeIn Frej Edvardsen & Halsten Kulle (eds.), Educational Games, Nova Science Publishers. pp. 323-329. 2010.Given the popularity of computer gaming and the educational and ethical problems they raise, we need a way of evaluating games. We should be concerned with particular games but also with games as a medium. We need normative criteria that allow us to judge to what extent the medium and the messages meet educational and ethical standards. This can inform the design, regulation, and practice of computer gaming. This chapter contributes to this task by articulating the epistemic, moral, and ethical …Read more
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How 'Secular‘ and 'Modern‘ are our Technological Practices and Culture?In Michael Funk (ed.), ‘Transdisziplinär’ ‘Interkulturell’, Königshausen & Neumann. pp. 313-329. 2015.Usually contemporary technology is understood to belong to secular modernity. But how ‚secular‘ and ‚modern‘ are our technological practices and culture? In this essay I argue that if we want to better understand technology, thinking in terms of a rupture between modernity and pre-modernity is inadequate. I show that Judeo-Christian forms of thinking still pervade modern technological visions and could help us think about what I call the ‚delegated spirituality‘ of the artefact, but that our enc…Read more
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How I learned to Love the RobotIn Ilse Oosterlaken & Jeroen van den Hoven (eds.), The Capability Approach, Technology and Design, Springer. pp. 77-86. 2012.