Mark Coeckelbergh

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.

Controversy arose when a humanoid robot named “Sophia” was given citizenship and did performances all over the world. Why should some robots gain citizenship? Going beyond recent discussions in robot ethics and human–robot interaction, and drawing on phenomenological approaches to political philosophy, actor-network theory, and performance-oriented philosophy of technology, we propose to interpret and discuss the world tour of Sophia as a political choreography: we argue that the media performances of the Sophia robot were politically choreographed to advance economic interests. Using a phenomenological approach and attending to the performance and movement of robots and illustrating our discussion with media material of the Sophia performance, we explore the mechanisms through which the media spectacle and robotic performance advanced the economic interests of technology industries and their governmental promotors.

Most accounts of responsibility focus on one type of responsibility, moral responsibility, or address one particular aspect of moral responsibility such as agency. This article outlines a broader framework to think about responsibility that includes causal responsibility, relational responsibility, and what I call “narrative responsibility” as a form of “hermeneutic responsibility”, connects these notions of responsibility with different kinds of knowledge, disciplines, and perspectives on human being, and shows how this framework is helpful for mapping and analysing how artificial intelligence (AI) challenges human responsibility and sense-making in various ways. Mobilizing recent hermeneutic approaches to technology, the article argues that next to, and interwoven with, other types of responsibility such as moral responsibility, we also have narrative and hermeneutic responsibility—in general and for technology. For example, it is our task as humans to make sense of, with and, if necessary, against AI. While from a posthumanist point of view, technologies also contribute to sense-making, humans are the experiencers and bearers of responsibility and always remain in charge when it comes to this hermeneutic responsibility. Facing and working with a world of data, correlations, and probabilities, we are nevertheless condemned to make sense. Moreover, this also has a normative, sometimes even political aspect: acknowledging and embracing our hermeneutic responsibility is important if we want to avoid that our stories are written elsewhere—through technology.

Given the rapid development of new technologies such as smart devices, robots, and artificial intelligence and their impact on the lives of people and on society, it is important and urgent to construct conceptual frameworks that help us to understand and evaluate them. Benefiting from tendencies towards a performative turn in the humanities and social sciences, drawing on thinking about the performing arts, and responding to gaps in contemporary artefact-oriented philosophy of technology, this book moves thinking about technology forward by using performance as a metaphor to understand and evaluate what we do with technology and what technology does with us. Focusing on the themes of knowledge/experience, agency, and power, and discussing some pertinent ethical issues such as deception, the narrative of the book moves through a number of performance practices: dance, theatre, music, stage magic, and (perhaps surprisingly) philosophy. These are used as sources for metaphors to think about technology—in particular contemporary devices and machines—and as interfaces to bring in various theories that are not usually employed in philosophy of technology. The result is a sequence of gestures and movements towards a performance-oriented conceptual framework for a thinking about technology which, liberated from the static, vision-centred, and dualistic metaphors offered by traditional philosophy, can do more justice to the phenomenology of our daily embodied, social, kinetic, temporal, and narrative performances with technology, our technoperformances. This book will appeal to scholars of philosophy of technology and performance studies who are interested in reconceptualizing the roles and impact of modern technology.

This book offers a systematic framework for thinking about the relationship between language and technology and an argument for interweaving thinking about technology with thinking about language. The main claim of philosophy of technology—that technologies are not mere tools and artefacts not mere things, but crucially and significantly shape what we perceive, do, and are—is re-thought in a way that accounts for the role of language in human technological experiences and practices. Engaging with work by Wittgenstein, Heidegger, McLuhan, Searle, Ihde, Latour, Ricoeur, and many others, the author critically responds to, and constructs a synthesis of, three "extreme", idealtype, untenable positions: only humans speak and neither language nor technologies speak, only language speaks and neither humans nor technologies speak, and only technology speaks and neither humans nor language speak. The construction of this synthesis goes hand in hand with a narrative about subjects and objects that become entangled and constitute one another. Using Words and Things thus draws in central discussions from other subdisciplines in philosophy, such as philosophy of language, epistemology, and metaphysics, to offer an original theory of the relationship between language and technology centered on use, performance, and narrative, and taking a transcendental turn.

Today it is widely recognized that we face urgent and serious environmental problems and we know much about them, yet we do very little. What explains this lack of motivation and change? Why is it so hard to change our lives? This book addresses this question by means of a philosophical inquiry into the conditions of possibility for environmental change. It discusses how we can become more motivated to do environmental good and what kind of knowledge we need for this, and explores the relations between motivation, knowledge, and modernity. After reviewing a broad range of possible philosophical and psychological responses to environmental apathy and inertia, the author argues for moving away from a modern focus on either detached reason and control or the natural, the sentiments, and the authentic, both of which make possible disengaging and alienating modes of relating to our environment. Instead he develops the notion of environmental skill: a concept that bridges the gap between knowledge and action, re-interprets environmental virtue, and suggests an environmental ethics centered on experience, know-how and skillful engagement with our environment. The author then explores the implications of this ethics for our lives: it changes the way we think about, and deal with, health, food, animals, energy, climate change, politics, and technology.

Moral status arguments are typically formulated as descriptive statements that tell us something about the world. But philosophy of language teaches us that language can also be used performatively: we do things with words and use words to try to get others to do things. Does and should this theory extend to what we say about moral status, and what does it mean? Drawing on Austin, Searle, and Butler and further developing relational views of moral status, this article explores what it means to conceptualize moral status in a performative way and in a way that reaches deep down to its basis, proposes a distinction between strong and weak versions of this view, and discusses the implications for thinking about the moral status of humans and nonhumans. Next to contributing to theory about performativity in the moral domain in general, this effort helps to reveal, understand, and evaluate the performative dimension of utterances made in public discussions about the moral status of animals and artificial agents such as robots and artificial intelligence.

Large language models such as ChatGPT enable users to automatically produce text but also raise ethical concerns, for example about authorship and deception. This paper analyses and discusses some key philosophical assumptions in these debates, in particular assumptions about authorship and language and—our focus—the use of the appearance/reality distinction. We show that there are alternative views of what goes on with ChatGPT that do not rely on this distinction. For this purpose, we deploy the two phased approach of deconstruction and relate our finds to questions regarding authorship and language in the humanities. We also identify and respond to two common counter-objections in order to show the ethical appeal and practical use of our proposal.

Purpose This paper aims to fill this gap by providing a conceptual framework for discussing “technologies of the self and other,” by showing that, in most cases, self-tracking also involves other-tracking. Design/methodology/approach In so doing, we draw upon Foucault’s “technologies of the self” and present-day literature on self-tracking technologies. We elaborate on two cases and practical domains to illustrate and discuss this mutual process: first, the quantified workplace; and second, quantification by wearables in a non-clinical and self-initiated context. Findings The main conclusion is that these shapings are never neutral and have ethical implications, such as regarding “quantified otherness,” a notion we propose to point at the risk that the other could become an object of examination and competition. Originality/value Although there is ample literature on the quantified self, considerably less attention is given to how the relation with the other is being shaped by self-tracking technologies that allow data sharing.

Dreyfus’s work is widely known for its critique of artificial intelligence and still stands as an example of how to do excellent philosophical work that is at the same time relevant to contemporary technological and scientific developments. But for philosophers of technology, especially for those sympathetic to using Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Wittgenstein as sources of inspiration, it has much more to offer. This paper outlines Dreyfus’s account of skillful coping and critically evaluates its potential for thinking about technology. First, it is argued that his account of skillful coping can be developed into a general view about handling technology which gives due attention to know-how/implicit knowledge and embodiment. Then a number of outstanding challenges are identified that are difficult to cope with if one remains entirely within the world of Dreyfus’s writings. They concern questions regarding other conceptualizations of technology and human–technology relations, issues concerning how to conceptualize the social and the relation between skill, meaning, and practices, and the question about the ethical and political implications of his view, including how virtue and skill are related. Acknowledging some known discussions about Dreyfus’s work, but also drawing on other material and on the author’s previous writings, the paper suggests that to address these challenges and develop the account of skillful coping into a wider scoped, Dreyfus-inspired philosophy of technology, it could take more distance from Heidegger’s conceptions of technology and benefit from engagement with work in postphenomenology, pragmatism, the later Wittgenstein, and virtue ethics.

There has been little attention to feminism and gender issues in mainstream philosophy of technology and vice versa. Since the beginning of the so-called »second wave feminism« (in the middle of the 20th century), there has been a growing awareness of the urgency of a critical reflection of technology and science within feminist discourse. But feminist thinkers have not consistently interpreted technology and science as emancipative and liberating for the feminist movement. Because technological development is mostly embedded in social, political, and economic systems that are patriarchally hierarchized, many feminists criticized the structures of dominance, marginalization and oppression inherent in numerous technologies. Therefore, the question of defining and ascribing responsibility in technics and science is essential for this anthology – regarding for instance the technological transformation of labor, the life in the information society, and the relationship between humans and machines.

To be intrinsically valuable means to be valuable for its own sake. Moral philosophy is often ethically anthropocentric, meaning that it locates intrinsic value within humans. This paper rejects ethical anthropocentrism and asks, in what ways might nonhumans be intrinsically valuable? The paper answers this question with a wide-ranging survey of theories of nonhuman intrinsic value. The survey includes both moral subjects and moral objects, and both natural and artificial nonhumans. Literatures from environmental ethics, philosophy of technology, philosophy of art, moral psychology, and related fields are reviewed, and gaps in these literatures are identified. Although the gaps are significant and much work remains to be done, the survey nonetheless demonstrates that those who reject ethical anthropocentrism have considerable resources available to develop their moral views. Given the many very high-stakes issues involving both natural and artificial nonhumans, and the sensitivity of these issues to how nonhumans are intrinsically valued, this is a vital project to pursue.

We are obsessed with self-improvement; it’s a billion-dollar industry. But apps, workshops, speakers, retreats, and life hacks have not made us happier. Obsessed with the endless task of perfecting ourselves, we have become restless, anxious, and desperate. We are improving ourselves to death. The culture of self-improvement stems from philosophical classics, perfectionist religions, and a ruthless strain of capitalism—but today, new technologies shape what it means to improve the self. The old humanist culture has given way to artificial intelligence, social media, and big data: powerful tools that do not only inform us but also measure, compare, and perhaps change us forever. This book shows how self-improvement culture became so toxic—and why we need both a new concept of the self and a mission of social change in order to escape it. Mark Coeckelbergh delves into the history of the ideas that shaped this culture, critically analyzes the role of technology, and explores surprising paths out of the self-improvement trap. Digital detox is no longer a viable option and advice based on ancient wisdom sounds like yet more self-help memes: The only way out is to transform our social and technological environment. Coeckelbergh advocates new “narrative technologies” that help us tell different and better stories about ourselves. However, he cautions, there is no shortcut that avoids the ancient philosophical quest to know yourself, or the obligation to cultivate the good life and the good society.

Recently there has been more attention to the cultural aspects of social robots. This paper contributes to this effort by offering a philosophical, in particular Wittgensteinian framework for conceptualizing in what sense and how robots are related to culture and by exploring what it would mean to create an “Ubuntu Robot”. In addition, the paper gestures towards a more culturally diverse and more relational approach to social robotics and emphasizes the role technology can play in addressing the challenges of modernity and in assisting cultural change: it argues that robots can help us to engage in cultural dialogue, reflect on our own culture, and change how we do things. In this way, the paper contributes to the growing literature on cross-cultural approaches to social robotics.

Most accounts of responsibility focus on one type of responsibility, moral responsibility, or address one particular aspect of moral responsibility such as agency. This article outlines a broader framework to think about responsibility that includes causal responsibility, relational responsibility, and what I call “narrative responsibility” as a form of “hermeneutic responsibility”, connects these notions of responsibility with different kinds of knowledge, disciplines, and perspectives on human being, and shows how this framework is helpful for mapping and analysing how artificial intelligence (AI) challenges human responsibility and sense-making in various ways. Mobilizing recent hermeneutic approaches to technology, the article argues that next to, and interwoven with, other types of responsibility such as moral responsibility, we also have narrative and hermeneutic responsibility—in general and for technology. For example, it is our task as humans to make sense of, with and, if necessary, against AI. While from a posthumanist point of view, technologies also contribute to sense-making, humans are the experiencers and bearers of responsibility and always remain in charge when it comes to this hermeneutic responsibility. Facing and working with a world of data, correlations, and probabilities, we are nevertheless condemned to make sense. Moreover, this also has a normative, sometimes even political aspect: acknowledging and embracing our hermeneutic responsibility is important if we want to avoid that our stories are written elsewhere—through technology.

While today there is much discussion about the ethics of artificial intelligence, less work has been done on the philosophical nature of AI. Drawing on Bergson and Ricoeur, this paper proposes to use the concepts of time, process, and narrative to conceptualize AI and its normatively relevant impact on human lives and society. Distinguishing between a number of different ways in which AI and time are related, the paper explores what it means to understand AI as narrative, as process, or as the emergent outcome of processes and narratives. It pays particular attention to what it calls the “narrator” and “time machine” roles of AI and the normative implications of these roles. It argues that AI processes and narratives shape our time and link past, present, and future in particular ways that are ethically and politically significant.

Does cruel behavior towards robots lead to vice, whereas kind behavior does not lead to virtue? This paper presents a critical response to Sparrow’s argument that there is an asymmetry in the way we (should) think about virtue and robots. It discusses how much we should praise virtue as opposed to vice, how virtue relates to practical knowledge and wisdom, how much illusion is needed for it to be a barrier to virtue, the relation between virtue and consequences, the moral relevance of the reality requirement and the different ways one can deal with it, the risk of anthropocentric bias in this discussion, and the underlying epistemological assumptions and political questions. This response is not only relevant to Sparrow’s argument or to robot ethics but also touches upon central issues in virtue ethics.

In response to my article “Earth, Technology, Language”, Christopher Müller asks whether use-oriented theory and Wittgensteinian language can capture the structural relations of power that shape habituation and argues that digital media do not provide opportunities for empowerment and democracy because there is no co-ownership. In my reply I argue that I have shown that this can be done with the broader conception of use I propose, that the grammar of technology should also be understood in terms of implicit knowledge, and that technology, like language, also has a public dimension: I claim that there is no such thing as a private technology or private power, and that some degree of co-ownership or resistance is possible. In the second part of the paper I reply to Bas de Boer’s questioning of my criticism of postsphenomenology. I insist that postphenomenology does not have the full instrumentarium to carry out an adequate and comprehensive analysis of the social dimension of technology use, and that it is important to attend to the structural dimension of technology, with or without use of the term ‘transcendental’. I clarify my use of the term as referring to conditions of possibility.

In response to challenges to moral philosophy presented by other disciplines and facing a diversity of approaches to the foundation and focus of morality, this paper argues for a pluralist meta-ethics that is methodologically hierarchical and guided by the principle of subsidiarity. Inspired by Deweyan pragmatism, this novel and original application of the subsidiarity principle and the related methodological proposal for a cascading meta-ethical architecture offer a “dirty” and instrumentalist understanding of meta-ethics that promises to work, not only in moral philosophy but also in the (rest of the) real world, and that facilitates collaboration with other disciplines outside moral philosophy.

Paul Ricœur has been one of the most influential and intellectually challenging philosophers of the last century, and his work has contributed to a vast array of fields: studies of language, of history, of ethics and politics. However, he has up until recently only had a minor impact on the philosophy of technology. Interpreting Technology aims to put Ricœur’s work at the centre of contemporary philosophical thinking concerning technology. It investigates his project of critical hermeneutics for rethinking established theories of technology, the growing ethical and political impacts of technologies on the modern lifeworld, and ways of analysing global sociotechnical systems such as the Internet. Ricœur’s philosophy allows us to approach questions such as: how could narrative theory enhance our understanding of technological mediation? How can our technical practices be informed by the ethical aim of living the good life, with and for others, in just institutions? And how does the emerging global media landscape shape our sense of self, and our understanding of history? These questions are more timely than ever, considering the enormous impact technologies have on daily life in the 21st century: on how we shape ourselves with health apps, how we engage with one-another through social media, and how we act politically through digital platforms.

This book discusses the problem of freedom and the limits of liberalism considering the challenges of governing climate change and artificial intelligence (AI). It mobilizes resources from political philosophy to make an original argument about the future of technology and the environment. Can artificial intelligence save the planet? And does that mean we will have to give up our political freedom? Stretching the meaning of freedom but steering away from authoritarian options, this book proposes that, next to using other principles such as justice and equality and taking collective action and cooperating at a global level, we adopt a positive and relational conception of freedom that creates better conditions for human and non-human flourishing. In contrast to easy libertarianism and arrogant techno-solutionism, this offers a less symptomatic treatment of the global crises we face and gives technologies such as AI a role in the gathering of a new, more inclusive political collective and the ongoing participative making of new common worlds. Written in a clear and accessible style, Green Leviathan or the Poetics of Political Liberty will appeal to researchers and students working in political philosophy, environmental philosophy, and the philosophy of technology.

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 informed and critical use as a form of empowerment while acknowledging their productive role in human values. Design/methodology/approach This paper presents an empirically informed philosophical analysis. Using the conceptual frameworks of technological appropriation and human–technological performances, while drawing on the interviews with voice assistants’ users and literature studies, this paper unravels the meaning-making processes in relation to these technologies in the household use. It additionally draws on a Wittgensteinian perspective to attend to the productive role of language and link to wider cultural meanings. Findings By combining two approaches, appropriation and technoperformances, and analyzing the themes of privacy, power and knowledge, the paper shows how voice assistants help to shape a specific moral subject: embodied in space and made as it performatively responds to the device and makes sense of it together with others. Originality/value The researchers show how through making sense of technologies in appropriation and performatively responding to them, people can change and intervene in the power structures that technologies suggest.

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 Wittgensteinian inroad to a more holistic and transcendental revision of postphenomenology which does not turn away from the artifact but places it in a wider social context and asks the question regarding the relation between language and technology. Finally, since the earth may be the ultimate condition of possibility, it is asked what this language-sensitive and transcendental approach may imply for rethinking our human position and agency in the Anthropocene. The paper ends with pointing to the role of language as transcendental condition that shapes the very project of thinking the “Anthropocene.”

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” is used to assist reasoning about this. The paper also discusses the implications of this approach for thinking about the moral standing of animals and humans, showing why, when, and how an indirect approach can also be helpful in these fields, and using Levinas and Dewey as sources of inspiration to discuss some challenges raised by this approach.

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 author argues that the most pressing need is not more or less regulation but the further development of moral imagination. The enhancement of moral imagination can help engineers to discern the moral relevance of design problems, to create new design options, and to envisage the possible outcomes of their designs. The author suggests a dual program of developing regulatory frameworks that support engineers’ autonomy and responsibility simultaneously with efforts to promote their moral imagination. He describes how some existing institutional changes have started off in this direction and proposes empirical research to take this further.