Mark Thomas Young

It is common to view the technologies that surround us as either tools or machines. This distinction is often understood to reflect a difference between kinds of technology: those which operate by human agency, and those which operate by their own, technological form of performative agency. This paper aims to explore how common arguments for the performative agency of machines ultimately fail to establish the claim that anything other than humans are capable of performing tasks. In light of such problems, I will propose an alternative conception which understands machines to be distinguished by the way in which the human agency on which they depend is concealed. After examining reasons why we should consider this concealment to represent a social rather than technological phenomenon, this paper concludes by exploring implications this view holds for the way in which the ethics of automation is approached in the philosophy of technology.

Faced with the crisis related to climate change and sustainability, we need to reflect on its relation with technology. This chapter discusses the nexus of environment and technology in two ways: it links to questions regarding modernity and the Anthropocene (ecomodernism vs. less modern thinking) and it discusses some practical examples of ambiguous relations between technology, sustainability, and climate change: geoengineering as a way to deal with climate change, environmental robots for sustainability, and AI for climate. The latter topic is elaborated with a practical example of how to manage software development (sustainability budgets) and with the case of energy use of training large language models. The discussion regarding technology in the Anthropocene and in the context of modernity is further developed with the case of geoengineering of volcanos.

This chapter discusses the ethics of biotechnologies. It starts by discussing biomedical ethics, its origins, and the influential principlism approach, which prescribes the four major principles of beneficence, non-maleficence, autonomy, and justice. It also discusses how emerging technologies create new challenges in bioethics, as they affect our genetic identities, reproductive capacities, and also the wider environment. Following this, the chapter discusses the central theme of human enhancement, and different important arguments to distinguish between enhancement and medical therapies. Two major lines of thought linked to human enhancement, of transhumanism and posthumanism, are discussed. Finally, the chapter provides an overview of influential standards and regulations applicable to biotechnologies.

This chapter shows that much of our thinking around the ethics of emerging technologies started from very concrete technical practices, in medicine, engineering, and computer science. It follows the stories of three famous practitioners in the history of science and engineering, Hippocrates, Oppenheimer, and Wiener, to explain how ethics emerged in their thinking as a response to the dilemmas they faced in practice. Out of these endeavors, to which countless practitioners have in fact contributed, important ethical frameworks and tools emerged: ethical oaths, regulatory limits to innovation, and ethical impact assessment.

This chapter presents several leading philosophical and sociological perspectives that help us to make sense of the relation between technology and the human condition. It focuses on six central themes. With Marx, it discusses the issue of alienation; with Feenberg and other critical scholars it explores the dominating force of instrumental reason; with Heidegger it discusses the way modern technology ‘enframes’ existence; with Foucault it explores how technologies may discipline and control the self; with Arendt it discusses how technologies may be involved in totalitarian modes of governance; and with Haraway it argues how technology can both sustain and go beyond sexism and discrimination in society.

This chapter discusses the impact of emerging technologies on citizenship and politics. It starts from the idea that for long, technologies have been developed to govern people through data gathering and quantitative analysis. This development is then looked at through the lens of citizenship, one of the core concepts in political philosophy, paying specific attention to the way status, identity, and participation are affected by emerging technologies. Following this, the chapter introduces the concept of civic virtue as both an ethical and a political concept that helps us evaluate the normative impacts of technologies on citizenship. Through a discussion of different theories of civic virtue, the chapter shows how technologies may both support and undermine civic virtue.

This chapter provides an introduction of the most influential theories of normative ethics: virtue ethics, duty ethics, and utilitarian ethics. It does so by following three prominent philosophers, Aristotle, Kant, and Bentham, while also stressing that the ideas discussed are not limited to their works or confined to Western philosophy. The approaches depart from different perspectives, namely from the good person, the righteous person, and the useful person. They have also been developed in particular sociotechnical contexts, in which medical skill, mechanical clockworks, and factories and prisons co-shaped our ethical thinking. The chapter concludes by showing how the ethical theories may be applied to evaluate the impacts of emerging technologies.

Historically, emerging technologies have often been hailed as a way to increase welfare and reduce social and economic inequalities. This chapter, however, will show how emerging technologies may be the source of increasing global inequalities. First, it discusses how new use contexts afforded by technologies may increase inequality, for instance by disrupting labor markets. Second, it shows how emerging technologies generate new conditions of production, which may lead to the degradation of work and exploitation of workers. Third, it explains how emerging technologies affect the distribution of power in the workplace, both leading to a process of deskilling and, paradoxically, requiring more skilled work while people have to manage increasingly complex systems.

This chapter discusses the emerging field of data ethics and ethics of AI. It starts with the notion of Big Data and the non-neutrality of data practices. It then turns to artificial intelligence, discussing its history and functioning and questions of agency and responsibility. Following this, the chapter delves into three core principles in AI and data ethics: privacy, fairness, and accountability. It concludes with discussing some important standards and regulations for AI and data ethics, like the GDPR.

This chapter explains the concept of responsible innovation and shows how it may be applied to concrete innovation practices. It starts by discussing the notion of responsibility and its different meanings, including forward-looking and backward-looking responsibility. It then follows a fictional startup, ‘Chatter,’ in its attempts to apply responsible innovation practices. It shows how Chatter uses scenario exercises to anticipate ethical impacts, how it uses value sensitive design approaches to embed values in design, and how it uses ethical checklists to evaluate ethical impacts of the products it launched.

This chapter introduces the theme of the book and tells the reader what to expect. It explains that the aim of the book is not to make you a great philosopher, but to make you sensitive to the importance and very interesting nature of questions around the ethics of emerging technologies. It tells you what ethics is, and what we may understand with ‘emerging technologies,’ and explains what is at stake in the chapters that are to follow by discussing some concrete technologies, from ultrasound, via cryptocurrencies, to the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

This chapter departs from the idea that technologies can have political and ethical values. It then offers three important approaches that try to grapple with this idea. The first is actor network theory, which departs from the idea of symmetry between human and non-human ‘actants.’ The second are theories or technological mediation, which offer us ways to understand different ‘human-technology-world’ relations. The third is value sensitive design, an approach developed by engineers to translate values into concrete design requirements. The chapter shows how each of these approaches can be applied to discuss concrete cases of technologies having values.

This chapter examines how developing new technologies involves reckoning with uncertainty and distinguishes between different forms of uncertainty which are relevant to ethical discussions surrounding emerging technologies. After demonstrating the extent to which such uncertainties subvert traditional approaches to ethical reasoning, we turn our attention to the concept of risk which forms a cornerstone of ethical and practical decision-making regarding emerging technologies. Here we explore how quantitative approaches to managing risk which are common in policymaking contexts face a range of ethical limitations and examine the use of precautionary principles as an alternative method of responding to the ethical challenges surrounding technological risk.

Introduction to Ethics of Emerging Technologies offers a set of lecture and seminar course materials for teaching ethics of emerging technologies. It covers the field in a comprehensive and accessible manner, emphasizing storytelling and examples, practical approaches and tools, and interactive assignments. The book addresses historical and current discourses, both academic and practical, related to the ethics of emerging technologies. This includes a basic introduction to normative ethics and applied ethics of technology, an accessible entry point to theories of technology and normativity, particular technological themes (engineering ethics, ethics of AI, and ethics of biotechnologies), as well as societal contexts in which emerging technologies play a pivotal role (citizenship, sustainability, and global inequality). This book is a must-read for science and engineering students who want to engage with the ethical impacts of their future work and research; for philosophy students who want to know more about emerging technologies; for researchers and educators interested in developing technology ethics curricula; and for general readers interested in the topic.

My goal in this paper is to show how the study of intuition in engineering design allows a fresh perspective from which to approach the issue of tacit knowledge, and one which may even help us gain some traction on stubborn philosophical problems. The first section of this paper seeks to outline the nature and role of intuition by examining the limitations of attempts to formalize the practice of engineering design. As an element of engineering practice that is commonly understood to resist codification, and be acquired exclusively through practice and experience, intuition not only shares a number of characteristics with philosophical accounts of tacit knowledge, but it also reveals promising new directions for its analysis in both historical and philosophical contexts. The second section of this article aims to draw out correlations between characteristics of intuition in engineering design and phenomenological aspects of the accounts of tacit knowledge provided by Michael Polanyi and Harry Collins. It will be shown how both thinkers emphasize the use of judgment stemming from a cultivated receptivity to relevant features of a task, as central to their accounts of tacit knowledge. Finally, I aim to show how a phenomenological understanding of tacit knowledge provides us with a solution to what I call the “ineffability problem”; the idea that because tacit knowledge resists codification it is ineffable and therefore possesses little explanatory value.

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.

It is common to view the technologies that surround us as either tools or machines. This distinction is often understood to reflect a difference between kinds of technology: those which operate by human agency, and those which operate by their own, technological form of performative agency. This paper aims to explore how common arguments for the performative agency of machines ultimately fail to establish the claim that anything other than humans are capable of performing tasks. In light of such problems, I will propose an alternative conception which understands machines to be distinguished by the way in which the human agency on which they depend is concealed. After examining reasons why we should consider this concealment to represent a social rather than technological phenomenon, this paper concludes by exploring implications this view holds for the way in which the ethics of automation is approached in the philosophy of technology.

Philosophy of science has traditionally focused on the epistemological dimensions of scientific practice at the expense of the ethical and political questions scientists encounter when addressing questions of policy in advisory contexts. In this article, I will explore how an exclusive focus on epistemology and theoretical reason can function to reinforce common, yet flawed assumptions concerning the role of scientific knowledge in policy decision making when reproduced in philosophy courses for science students. In order to address this concern, I will argue that such courses should supplement the traditional focus on theoretical reason with an analysis of the practical reasoning employed by scientists in advisory contexts. Later sections of this paper outline a teaching strategy by which this can be achieved that consists of two steps: the first examines idealized examples of scientific advising in order to highlight the irreducible role played by moral reasoning in justifying policy recommendations. The second employs argument analysis to reveal implicit moral assumptions in actual advisory reports that form the basis for class discussion. This paper concludes by examining some of the wider benefits that can be expected from adopting such an approach.

When infrastructural technology is functioning correctly, it is often considered to recede from view and become invisible. According to this perspective, visibility is restored in cases of breakdown and malfunction, which for this reason, are often understood to represent important epistemic opportunities for grasping previously hidden aspects of infrastructure. This article seeks to outline the limitations of the idea that infrastructural failure has a positive epistemic function by distinguishing between two fundamentally different ways in which the nature of technological function can be conceptualised; the first understands function as stemming primarily from the way a technology was designed and produced, the second as a process sustained by constant human activities of maintenance and repair. After illustrating how a number of recent studies of infrastructure build upon insights granted by the latter process perspective, this article aims to demonstrate how the experience of breakdown itself does little to facilitate a shift towards understanding infrastructure in this way. For this reason, this article ends with a suggestion for a shift in emphasis in studies of infrastructure, away from breakdown and towards a sustained examination of everyday practices of maintenance, repair and modification of infrastructural technologies.

This article aims to challenge the thesis of the craft origins of scientific empiricism by demonstrating how the empirical practices of early experimentalism differed in significant ways from the activities of artisans. Through a phenomenological analysis of instrumental observation and experimental demonstrations, I aim to show how experimentalism privileged modes of experience that were foreign to craft traditions and which facilitated a newfound estrangement of human subjects from the objects of their knowledge. Firstly, we will review concerns surrounding the promotion of optical instruments by early experimentalists to reveal how these technologies were understood not only to amplify the senses but also to obscure contextual and relative qualities available to unaided visual perception. Secondly, we will examine the experimental practices of the early Royal Society, to see how experimental demonstrations were deliberately structured to facilitate experiences of the natural world that were divorced from practical and personal contexts. It is here that the divergence from artisanal epistemology is rendered most apparent. For in contrast to craft practices, which favored forms of experience which were personal and engaged, I will argue that the new scientific practices of the 17th century played a central role in effecting the researcher's transformation into a new kind of epistemological subject – the spectator.

My goal in this article is to explore the extent to which the conception of rule-following which emerges from Wittgenstein’s later works can also yield important insights concerning the nature of technological practices. In particular, this article aims to examine how two interrelated themes of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations can be applied in the philosophical analysis of technology. Our first theme concerns linguistic practice; broadly construed, it is the claim that the use of language cannot be understood as determined by a system of context independent rules. The second, interrelated theme emerges as a consequence of the first; that the meaning of language is rendered indeterminate when analyzed in isolation from contexts of practice. Following the common tendency in the sociology of technology to draw analogies between language and technology, I aim to show how the arguments that Wittgenstein makes for these two claims concerning language can also help us to understand the relation between technical artifacts and technological practices. For, similar to Wittgenstein’s account of rules, it will be shown how artifacts cannot be adequately understood in isolation from a wider background of skillful practice and interpretation. To illustrate this idea, we will examine the case of the Geiger counter, with a view towards illustrating how important aspects of the function of the device are rendered indeterminate when assessed on the basis of physical design alone.

Philosophical analyses of scientific methodology have long understood intuition to be incompatible with a rule based reasoning that is often considered necessary for a rational scientific method. This paper seeks to challenge this contention by highlighting the indispensable role that intuition plays in the application of methodologies for scientific discovery. In particular, it seeks to outline a positive role for intuition and personal judgment in scientific discovery by exploring a comparison between the use of heuristic reasoning in scientific practice and engineering design. While these discussions share many features, it will also be shown that the successful use of heuristics in engineering design is often considered to depend on a crucial factor that is markedly absent from accounts of the use of heuristics in scientific discovery; experienced judgment. In the final sections of this paper, I will compare attitudes to the role of computer analysis in scientific and engineering practices, with the aim of showing how the limitations of scientific discovery machines reveal the need for including intuition in philosophical accounts of heuristic reasoning in scientific discovery.

Since Aristotle, it has been common to understand wonder as a psychological state characterized by an absence of rational understanding. Drawing on this idea, a number of historians have suggested that the wonder which had long characterized the experience of automata, declined in the early modern period alongside the increased availability of theoretical treatises on mechanics. This article seeks to challenge this view by examining the relationship between rational and practical modes of technical understanding in John Wilkins’ Mathematicall Magick (1648). My aim is to show that a close reading of the second book of the Mathematicall Magick reveals an alternative conception of wonder as an experience of skilled workmanship that both tolerates theoretical understanding and is increased through practical experience. It will be my claim that the conception of technical wonder which emerges from Wilkin’s descriptions of automata, reveals how the concept of Aristotelian wonder is too reductive to capture the variety of ways in which mechanical technology was experienced in early modern England.

This paper aims to assess the credibility of the legitimation thesis; the claim that the development of experimental science involved a legitimation of certain aspects of artisanal practice or craft knowledge. My goal will be to provide a critique of this idea by examining Francis Bacon’s notion of ‘mechanical history’ and the influence it exerted on attempts by later generations of scholars to appropriate the knowledge of craft traditions. Specifically, I aim to show how such projects were often premised upon socio-epistemological ideals that served to reinforce, rather than relinquish boundaries between artisans and natural philosophers. It will be my claim that a closer examination of the presuppositions underlying attempts by early modern natural philosophers to appropriate craft knowledge reveals, not a desire to legitimize aspects of artisanal practice, but rather strategies aimed at demonstrating the inferiority of the local ways of knowing upon which it was based.

Despite the vast amount of work produced by philosophers, historians and sociologists on the nature of scientific activity, “observation itself is rarely the focus of attention and almost never the subject of historical inquiry in its own right”. This general lack of interest in the nature of scientific observation was perhaps most clearly reflected in the Vienna Circle’s attempt to establish an analysis of science beginning at the level of protocol sentences. To do so, of course, they had to disregard the humidity and fogged lenses facing the primatologist in the jungle, or the way in which flights aboard military aircraft were once sought by physicists in order to expose...