Alexander Gerner

Mechane in Aristotle designates the theater machine, which provided for illusion and the effects and dramaturgies of overpowering as in the aleatory principle of Deus ex machina. The creation of an absolute experience machine—as an AI sex robot that as well is a companion and even is wished for as a lifetime partner as imagined by David Levy or recently described in a retro-fiction novel entitled “Machines like me” by the author Ewan McEvan 20192 lies at the core of contemporary uncanny human artistic endeavors reflected as well in techno-scientific praxis. Kathleen Richardson—the initiator of the manifesto and sex robots ban campaign—as a scholar reread the cyborg as a “polemical tool to critique social relations, and in this sense, it is similar to the robot”. Thus, it seems that the transgressive 90’s with its drive for critical post-humanism 20 to 30 years later has to rethink the topic of human’s real limits of transgression with machinic agential entities that are build under the pretense of gaining or at least simulating full agency, when thinking on how hacking human social relations with artificial agential technical objects might even install our need to renegotiate practical and ontological boundaries especially between technical objects and human beings that many technological post-human- ist and ideologists of transhumanism had hoped for. This is one of the reasons that philosophy of technology today is facing entirely new tasks and questions that bounce our questions back to the foundation of techno-anthropology: it has to describe a world full of human, technical transformations induced by new technical objects and systems, including contemporary techno-visions of a human future and sex robotics and its alterity evasion by use and interaction with ICT technologies.

This paper dwells on the question of how we can enhance perspectives on the enhancement of attention in children. By shifting the neuro-enhancement of attention debate from the field of biomedicine into the area of philosophy of technology of control and philosophy of attention, I render two concepts operative for the neuroethical debate on enhancing children’s attention in self- melioration: control and autonomy in attention enhancement. The shaping of a self entails three things: First, individual work on personality traits. Second, the cultural notion of collective formation in a world shaped by others. Third, it includes self-melioration that contains both terms of self-formation and Kipke’s narrow account of Neuro-enhancement. Concerning attention enhancements in children music enrichment as well as mathematical skill-formation will be analysed briefly.