#philosophyoftechnology — Public Fediverse posts

I am having fun with preparing my intro lecture for the our new #PSTS course on #Enviroment and #Computation . Any readings and projects that are not to be missed? #PhilosophyOfTechnology #HistoryOfTechnology #HigherEd

New publication: Our joint paper on #Relationality in the #PhilosophyOfTechnology just came out (w/ Bas de Boer, Anna Puzio, and Jan Peter Bergen): https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-026-10040-9 #philosophy #OpenAccess #NewMaterialism #Postphenomenology #ANT

Why is it a bad thing to be dependent on LLMs?

For avoidance of doubt I think it clearly is a bad thing. But this is more often assumed than it is stated. After all I’m dependent on Google Maps to navigate, my glasses to see and my phone to remember numbers. These are different forms of technological dependence which I’ve long made my peace with. Whereas the extent to which I use LLMs, even within the limits I’ve defined as responsible use I’m ethically comfortable with, continues to trouble me. A great deal about the politics of LLMs in education hinges on this question of dependence. What are some reasons why dependence might be a bad thing?

• It prevents a user from developing a capability they would otherwise develop.
• It leads to the atrophy of a user’s existing skill by removing occasions for practice.
• It leaves a user dependent on a paid subscription to a large tech firm which is uncomfortable in itself.
• It leaves a user vulnerable to this tech firm raising prices and/or enshittfying their product in response to commercial pressures.
• It removes the imperative for the user to seek out human interlocutors to play the role which the LLM is playing in what is essentially communicative reflexivity.

Once we map out the varied reasons for dependence being problematic, it’s easier to recognise that user-model interaction can be beneficial in the present tense while also storing up significant problems for the future. The relationship of dependence might not be a problem now but there’s a non-trivial chance it will be in the future. The harms are anticipated as much as they are actual and AI criticism looks very different once we allow for that.

(The next book Milan Sturmer and I are writing, sequel to the Platform Learns to Speak, argues there are deeper psychic costs which existing models of dependence cannot adequately account for. But this is a different register of analysis for a different blog post)

Why is it a bad thing to be dependent on LLMs?

For avoidance of doubt I think it clearly is a bad thing. But this is more often assumed than it is stated. After all I’m dependent on Google Maps to navigate, my glasses to see and my phone to remember numbers. These are different forms of technological dependence which I’ve long made my peace with. Whereas the extent to which I use LLMs, even within the limits I’ve defined as responsible use I’m ethically comfortable with, continues to trouble me. A great deal about the politics of LLMs in education hinges on this question of dependence. What are some reasons why dependence might be a bad thing?

• It prevents a user from developing a capability they would otherwise develop.
• It leads to the atrophy of a user’s existing skill by removing occasions for practice.
• It leaves a user dependent on a paid subscription to a large tech firm which is uncomfortable in itself.
• It leaves a user vulnerable to this tech firm raising prices and/or enshittfying their product in response to commercial pressures.
• It removes the imperative for the user to seek out human interlocutors to play the role which the LLM is playing in what is essentially communicative reflexivity.

Once we map out the varied reasons for dependence being problematic, it’s easier to recognise that user-model interaction can be beneficial in the present tense while also storing up significant problems for the future. The relationship of dependence might not be a problem now but there’s a non-trivial chance it will be in the future. The harms are anticipated as much as they are actual and AI criticism looks very different once we allow for that.

(The next book Milan Sturmer and I are writing, sequel to the Platform Learns to Speak, argues there are deeper psychic costs which existing models of dependence cannot adequately account for. But this is a different register of analysis for a different blog post)

Article: The attempt to rethink digital art through the lens of Nicolai Hartmann’s ontology is genuinely compelling.
An ambitious and thought provoking contribution to current debates on digital aesthetics, virtuality, and the ontology of digital art.
#digitalart #digitalaesthetics #mediaTheory #philosophyoftechnology #digitalarthistory #AIaesthetics
👉 https://doi.org/10.11588/dahj.2026.11.113265.

Article: The attempt to rethink digital art through the lens of Nicolai Hartmann’s ontology is genuinely compelling.
An ambitious and thought provoking contribution to current debates on digital aesthetics, virtuality, and the ontology of digital art.
#digitalart #digitalaesthetics #mediaTheory #philosophyoftechnology #digitalarthistory #AIaesthetics
👉 https://doi.org/10.11588/dahj.2026.11.113265.

I love going somewhere dark at night, just looking up at the stars, trying (and failing 😏) to imagine infinity.

Yesterday I came across Carl Sagan’s idea: we are a way for the universe to know itself

And it got me thinking:

What about us trying to build intelligence.

Not just to understand it
but replicate it
scale it
optimize and monetize it

What does our urge to build it, and how we build it, reveal about us?

#AI #TechEthics #PhilosophyOfTechnology #Humanity #Innovation

I love going somewhere dark at night, just looking up at the stars, trying (and failing 😏) to imagine infinity.

Yesterday I came across Carl Sagan’s idea: we are a way for the universe to know itself

And it got me thinking:

What about us trying to build intelligence.

Not just to understand it
but replicate it
scale it
optimize and monetize it

What does our urge to build it, and how we build it, reveal about us?

#AI #TechEthics #PhilosophyOfTechnology #Humanity #Innovation

Paaljon onneeaa vaan! 🎵 🤗 🍀

https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilkka_Niiniluoto

#juhla #80 #niiniluoto #filosofia #philosophy #philosophyOfScience #philosophyOfTechnology #university #yliopisto #professor #valistus #sivistys #tiede #culture #anniversary #science #mathematics #logic #reasoning #criticalThinking #teaching #learning #oppiminen #opetus #happy #ajattelu #thinking #pseudo_science

Paaljon onneeaa vaan! 🎵 🤗 🍀

https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilkka_Niiniluoto

#juhla #80 #niiniluoto #filosofia #philosophy #philosophyOfScience #philosophyOfTechnology #university #yliopisto #professor #valistus #sivistys #tiede #culture #anniversary #science #mathematics #logic #reasoning #criticalThinking #teaching #learning #oppiminen #opetus #happy #ajattelu #thinking #pseudo_science

The Architecture of Resistance

The seventeenth-century Hague, the mid-twentieth-century Levant, and the digital terraforming of 2025 have a shared preoccupation with the “Average.” Whether it is the theologian’s way or predictive stats, control begins by smoothing out the landscape. The project of power is a project of cartography and illumination—an attempt to banish the dark corners where the unmapped might grow. Thus, the history of resistance, of being “against the world”, is less a history of rebellion than a history of seeking cover.

In Spinoza’a world, legibility was the cosmos in an ordered hierarchy. Meaning descended from an external judge and was mirrored by the terrestrial proxy of the King and more often the priest. Behavior was aligned to the “Scriptural Average.” A pre-written behavioral code that transformed the conatus—that primal drive to persist and expand—into the passive states of hope and fear. By removing the external judge, Spinoza suggested that freedom is found in the intellectual mastery of the causes that move us. A pushback against the “average pious subject,” asserting that every individual is a necessary, logical expression of an infinite substance. There is no error in the world, only the lack of a thick enough understanding to perceive the necessity of one’s own outlier status. 

With this position, and self assurance, Spinoza became illegible to his friends, his doting teacher, and his community. He was cast out, but his thoughts are the seeds of today’s world. 

In the Beirut and Damascus of the mid-twentieth century, the imposition of legibility took the form of the “Citizen-as-Monument.” It was a world of endings, where identity was a frozen artifact of nationalist scripts and religious orthodoxies. The poet Adonis, through Mihyar, pushes against this world not by asserting a new identity, but through a “movement of erasure.” If a stable interior is to form, it is to be quickly discarded. A stable interior is merely another coordinate, a dependable predictor, for the state to map. Mihyar becomes a “knight of strange words,” defined by the iltifat—the sudden turn away. By peeling back the layers of the social mask and embracing a radical anonymity, he counters the stagnant city. He exists as a hot wind, something that is felt through its movement and friction, yet remains entirely unsearchable by the collective grammar.

We have entered a third world, a digital landscape that functions as a terraformed plain. It is, in a sense, a Spinozan monism—all data is one substance—but it is a substance managed by a Leibnizian bureaucracy of optimization. The mechanism of control is no longer the scripture or the state monument, but the “Mechanical Harmony” of the statistical mean. A decade ago this was social media shaping votes. Today’s AI tools, perhaps inadvertently and perhaps not,  impose an “averageness” on thought itself, by providing the next likely response and hiding the outlier. This is a form of disindividuation disguised as efficiency, a smoothing of the world’s texture until it becomes a frictionless surface for the sake of searchability.

What emerges as a necessary response is the logic of the thicket. If the terraformed plain is the habitat of the tourist—where everything is predicted, optimized, and known—the thicket is the habitat of the explorer. It is a deliberate architecture of complexity, an insistence on terroir and the messy, non-replicable context of the local. To build a thicket is to re-introduce friction into a world too smooth. We are apes inhabiting the long tail. Like Spinoza, our conatus withers under the umbrella the statistical mean. If every response is predicted, the individual ceases to be a cause and becomes merely a consequence of the architecture.

To emerge, life itself needed discontinuities. The thicket provides the opacity necessary for the transforming process of the self to occur. It honors the uneven distribution of the world, providing a high-density environment of unique, complex encounters impossible in a flat plain. In this 2025 context, to be “against the world” is perhaps better understood as being a cultivator of these unsearchable spaces. The Dark Forest of the internet has created literal operating systems, habitats for our interconnected selves. Away from the violent imposition of the center, things can still happen by surprise. We seek cover in the thicket as a primal way of being where the emergent world remains deep enough to inhabit.

#Adonis #AI #AlgorithmicFlattening #AliAhmadSaidEsber #ArchitectureOfResistance #artificialIntelligence #Conatus #CulturalCritique #DigitalTerraforming #history #Iltifat #IntellectualHistory #LLMs #LogicOfTheThicket #MechanicalHarmony #MihyarTheDamascene #Monism #Noodiversity #OntologicalResistance #philosophy #philosophyOfTechnology #RadicalImmanence #Spinoza #StatisticalAverage #TheThicket #writing

The Architecture of Resistance

The seventeenth-century Hague, the mid-twentieth-century Levant, and the digital terraforming of 2025 have a shared preoccupation with the “Average.” Whether it is the theologian’s way or predictive stats, control begins by smoothing out the landscape. The project of power is a project of cartography and illumination—an attempt to banish the dark corners where the unmapped might grow. Thus, the history of resistance, of being “against the world”, is less a history of rebellion than a history of seeking cover.

In Spinoza’a world, legibility was the cosmos in an ordered hierarchy. Meaning descended from an external judge and was mirrored by the terrestrial proxy of the King and more often the priest. Behavior was aligned to the “Scriptural Average.” A pre-written behavioral code that transformed the conatus—that primal drive to persist and expand—into the passive states of hope and fear. By removing the external judge, Spinoza suggested that freedom is found in the intellectual mastery of the causes that move us. A pushback against the “average pious subject,” asserting that every individual is a necessary, logical expression of an infinite substance. There is no error in the world, only the lack of a thick enough understanding to perceive the necessity of one’s own outlier status. 

With this position, and self assurance, Spinoza became illegible to his friends, his doting teacher, and his community. He was cast out, but his thoughts are the seeds of today’s world. 

In the Beirut and Damascus of the mid-twentieth century, the imposition of legibility took the form of the “Citizen-as-Monument.” It was a world of endings, where identity was a frozen artifact of nationalist scripts and religious orthodoxies. The poet Adonis, through Mihyar, pushes against this world not by asserting a new identity, but through a “movement of erasure.” If a stable interior is to form, it is to be quickly discarded. A stable interior is merely another coordinate, a dependable predictor, for the state to map. Mihyar becomes a “knight of strange words,” defined by the iltifat—the sudden turn away. By peeling back the layers of the social mask and embracing a radical anonymity, he counters the stagnant city. He exists as a hot wind, something that is felt through its movement and friction, yet remains entirely unsearchable by the collective grammar.

We have entered a third world, a digital landscape that functions as a terraformed plain. It is, in a sense, a Spinozan monism—all data is one substance—but it is a substance managed by a Leibnizian bureaucracy of optimization. The mechanism of control is no longer the scripture or the state monument, but the “Mechanical Harmony” of the statistical mean. A decade ago this was social media shaping votes. Today’s AI tools, perhaps inadvertently and perhaps not,  impose an “averageness” on thought itself, by providing the next likely response and hiding the outlier. This is a form of disindividuation disguised as efficiency, a smoothing of the world’s texture until it becomes a frictionless surface for the sake of searchability.

What emerges as a necessary response is the logic of the thicket. If the terraformed plain is the habitat of the tourist—where everything is predicted, optimized, and known—the thicket is the habitat of the explorer. It is a deliberate architecture of complexity, an insistence on terroir and the messy, non-replicable context of the local. To build a thicket is to re-introduce friction into a world too smooth. We are apes inhabiting the long tail. Like Spinoza, our conatus withers under the umbrella the statistical mean. If every response is predicted, the individual ceases to be a cause and becomes merely a consequence of the architecture.

To emerge, life itself needed discontinuities. The thicket provides the opacity necessary for the transforming process of the self to occur. It honors the uneven distribution of the world, providing a high-density environment of unique, complex encounters impossible in a flat plain. In this 2025 context, to be “against the world” is perhaps better understood as being a cultivator of these unsearchable spaces. The Dark Forest of the internet has created literal operating systems, habitats for our interconnected selves. Away from the violent imposition of the center, things can still happen by surprise. We seek cover in the thicket as a primal way of being where the emergent world remains deep enough to inhabit.

#Adonis #AI #AlgorithmicFlattening #AliAhmadSaidEsber #ArchitectureOfResistance #artificialIntelligence #Conatus #CulturalCritique #DigitalTerraforming #history #Iltifat #IntellectualHistory #LLMs #LogicOfTheThicket #MechanicalHarmony #MihyarTheDamascene #Monism #Noodiversity #OntologicalResistance #philosophy #philosophyOfTechnology #RadicalImmanence #Spinoza #StatisticalAverage #TheThicket #writing

"This paper contends with the notion that the methods of machine learning (ML) are unique among the tools of science in enabling a form of theory-free inductive inference. I challenge these assertions of epistemic distinctness, attributing the prevalence of these views to an untenable conception of scientific objectivity: what I term a theory-free ideal, in homage to its normative counterpart. ML, as a formal method of induction, must rely on conceptual or theoretical resources to get inference off the ground. By means of two case studies, I argue that this theory-free ideal has a deleterious effect on the epistemic standing of ML-involving science."

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10670-025-01010-x

#ML #MachineLearning #Theory #Science #TheoryFreeScience #Epistemology #PhilosophyOfTechnology

"This paper contends with the notion that the methods of machine learning (ML) are unique among the tools of science in enabling a form of theory-free inductive inference. I challenge these assertions of epistemic distinctness, attributing the prevalence of these views to an untenable conception of scientific objectivity: what I term a theory-free ideal, in homage to its normative counterpart. ML, as a formal method of induction, must rely on conceptual or theoretical resources to get inference off the ground. By means of two case studies, I argue that this theory-free ideal has a deleterious effect on the epistemic standing of ML-involving science."

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10670-025-01010-x

#ML #MachineLearning #Theory #Science #TheoryFreeScience #Epistemology #PhilosophyOfTechnology

Bataille is the greatest. His philosophy of history is just a stroke of pure genius!!

👉 "Georges Bataille, in The Accursed Share I–III and the earlier essay “The Notion of Expenditure,” proposed that economies are not fundamentally organized by scarcity but by surplus. The decisive fact for him is excess energy on a planetary scale, supplied ultimately by the sun, that must be dissipated. What classical political economy treats as an aberration or a luxury, Bataille reads as primary law. Societies must spend their surpluses, either through growth and technical intensification or through nonproductive outlays that include luxury, sacrifice, festivals, erotic excess, and war. Sovereignty, in this frame, is not mastery over scarcity but the capacity to direct and assume the risk of expenditure. To think historically, therefore, is to map not only the circuits of production and utility but also the socially organized destinations of waste.

Placed beside Michel Foucault’s analysis of power and Vaclav Smil’s histories of energy, Bataille functions as a necessary third term. Smil tells us how energy is captured, stored, and converted across eras. Foucault shows how power arranges bodies, spaces, and times to render those conversions productive. Bataille asks where the inevitable surplus goes and under whose sign it is consumed. These lenses are complementary rather than competitive. Energetics names constraints and potentials. Power names the micro-mechanisms that harness them. General economy names the fate of the overflow.

In industrial modernity, coal and steam magnified productive force. Foucault’s disciplinary apparatus synchronized bodies to these rhythms. Yet even at the height of Taylorist efficiency, expenditure did not disappear. It migrated to wars of mass mobilization, to colonial spectacles, to the pageantry of nationalism, and to consumerist luxury."
https://socialecologies.wordpress.com/2025/09/22/the-planetary-machine-dividual-life-and-the-tyranny-of-techne/
#STS #PhilosophyOfTechnology #Algorithms #Bataille #Foucault #Anders #Materialism

Bataille is the greatest. His philosophy of history is just a stroke of pure genius!!

👉 "Georges Bataille, in The Accursed Share I–III and the earlier essay “The Notion of Expenditure,” proposed that economies are not fundamentally organized by scarcity but by surplus. The decisive fact for him is excess energy on a planetary scale, supplied ultimately by the sun, that must be dissipated. What classical political economy treats as an aberration or a luxury, Bataille reads as primary law. Societies must spend their surpluses, either through growth and technical intensification or through nonproductive outlays that include luxury, sacrifice, festivals, erotic excess, and war. Sovereignty, in this frame, is not mastery over scarcity but the capacity to direct and assume the risk of expenditure. To think historically, therefore, is to map not only the circuits of production and utility but also the socially organized destinations of waste.

Placed beside Michel Foucault’s analysis of power and Vaclav Smil’s histories of energy, Bataille functions as a necessary third term. Smil tells us how energy is captured, stored, and converted across eras. Foucault shows how power arranges bodies, spaces, and times to render those conversions productive. Bataille asks where the inevitable surplus goes and under whose sign it is consumed. These lenses are complementary rather than competitive. Energetics names constraints and potentials. Power names the micro-mechanisms that harness them. General economy names the fate of the overflow.

In industrial modernity, coal and steam magnified productive force. Foucault’s disciplinary apparatus synchronized bodies to these rhythms. Yet even at the height of Taylorist efficiency, expenditure did not disappear. It migrated to wars of mass mobilization, to colonial spectacles, to the pageantry of nationalism, and to consumerist luxury."
https://socialecologies.wordpress.com/2025/09/22/the-planetary-machine-dividual-life-and-the-tyranny-of-techne/
#STS #PhilosophyOfTechnology #Algorithms #Bataille #Foucault #Anders #Materialism

But I agree that we also must keep the focus on enabling access or democratisation, although I’m not sure that in the late stage capital ‘enshitification’ world that aspect of industry is really delivering this.

Stay tuned for part 2 on the idea for 21st century arts and crafts movement.

6/n… Fin

Clearly need to finish my blog

#Philosophy #PhilosophyOfTechnics #technics #simondon #norbertweiner #philosophyoftechnology #folkcraftofsoftware

Mastodon what do we think of the debate below any part time philosophers got a take?

I was debating with my friend about craft vs industry, their argument that craft is about exclusivity and establishing identity through product, that industry represents the democratisation the access to things.

Which is a good point, however … 1/n

#Philosophy #PhilosophyOfTechnics #technics #simondon #norbertweiner #philosophyoftechnology #folkcraftofsoftware

In a world shaped by AI, what kind of ethics do we need?
@RainerMuehlhoff’s new book The Ethics of AI: Power, Critique, Responsibility offers a power-aware framework for understanding how AI technologies shape subjectivity, prediction, and control.
A compelling manifesto for collective responsibility, regulation, and systemic change.

#OpenAccess
🔗 https://bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/the-ethics-of-ai
#AI #Ethics #CriticalAI #AIPolicy #DigitalPower #PredictionCulture #PhilosophyOfTechnology #SociotechnicalSystems

In a world shaped by AI, what kind of ethics do we need?
@RainerMuehlhoff’s new book The Ethics of AI: Power, Critique, Responsibility offers a power-aware framework for understanding how AI technologies shape subjectivity, prediction, and control.
A compelling manifesto for collective responsibility, regulation, and systemic change.

#OpenAccess
🔗 https://bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/the-ethics-of-ai
#AI #Ethics #CriticalAI #AIPolicy #DigitalPower #PredictionCulture #PhilosophyOfTechnology #SociotechnicalSystems

Lately, I’ve been turning over questions about creativity, machines, and meaning—quiet arguments that shape how I build stories. If something not human can create, what does that mean for those of us who’ve long defined ourselves by creation? This essay isn’t a conclusion, but a reflection from the edge where imagination meets emerging tech.
📖 Read: https://mountainthermit.blogspot.com/2025/04/the-shifting-boundaries-of-creativity.html
#AI #WritersAndAI #SpeculativeThinking #Creativity #PhilosophyOfTechnology #ArtificialIntelligence

Lately, I’ve been turning over questions about creativity, machines, and meaning—quiet arguments that shape how I build stories. If something not human can create, what does that mean for those of us who’ve long defined ourselves by creation? This essay isn’t a conclusion, but a reflection from the edge where imagination meets emerging tech.
📖 Read: https://mountainthermit.blogspot.com/2025/04/the-shifting-boundaries-of-creativity.html
#AI #WritersAndAI #SpeculativeThinking #Creativity #PhilosophyOfTechnology #ArtificialIntelligence

If you are aware of curious and critical students looking for a unique interdisciplinary #MSc Programme which combines #PhilosophyOfTechnology, #PhilosophyOfScience, #EthicsOfTechnology, #HistoryOfTechnology and #STS , please point them to #Philosophy of #Science , #Technology , and #Society. At the Open Day, they learn about our dedicated tracks on #TechnologyAndValues (in collaboration with 4TU.Centre for Ethics and Technology), #AI , and #Sustainability. https://www.utwente.nl/en/education/study-choice-calendar/master-open-day/#

"AI is Creating a Generation of Illiterate Programmers" https://nmn.gl/blog/ai-illiterate-programmers

This is #proletarization, in the stieglerian sense, in a very pure form: loosing your knowledge to a technical object or process.

#BernardStiegler also gives a name to what happens when we leave our know-how to a technology, and when the ones in control of that technology do not care – in other ways than in terms of profit – about the ones trusting it: #SystemicStupidity

#AI #programming #PhilosophyOfTechnology

"AI is Creating a Generation of Illiterate Programmers" https://nmn.gl/blog/ai-illiterate-programmers

This is #proletarization, in the stieglerian sense, in a very pure form: loosing your knowledge to a technical object or process.

#BernardStiegler also gives a name to what happens when we leave our know-how to a technology, and when the ones in control of that technology do not care – in other ways than in terms of profit – about the ones trusting it: #SystemicStupidity

#AI #programming #PhilosophyOfTechnology

#PhilosophyOfTechnology esp.
#anthropology in the run of the #digitalization remake of the #Lebenswelt ...

Chris Durt's work, often considering AI in a phenomenological mood, imop is once more worth this (short) read

https://www.academia.edu/126506449/Die_Digitalisierung_der_Lebenswelt_Von_der_Mathematisierung_der_Natur_zur_intelligenten_Manipulation_des_menschlichen_Sinn_und_Erlebenshorizontes

#PhilosophyOfTechnology esp.
#anthropology in the run of the #digitalization remake of the #Lebenswelt ...

Chris Durt's work, often considering AI in a phenomenological mood, imop is once more worth this (short) read

https://www.academia.edu/126506449/Die_Digitalisierung_der_Lebenswelt_Von_der_Mathematisierung_der_Natur_zur_intelligenten_Manipulation_des_menschlichen_Sinn_und_Erlebenshorizontes

And back to Münster, after a fruitful meeting on #contestable #sustainable #urban
#transitions in #Utrecht. #PhilosophyOfTheCity #PhilosophyOfTechnology

New paper: Caroline Stockman (University of Winchester) examines the human-technology relationship in current uses of generative AI (GenAI) through the lens of existential philosophy. #OpenAccess via Weizenbaum Journal of the Digital Society:

➡️ https://doi.org/10.34669/wi.wjds/5.1.2

#wjds #GenerativeAI #PhilosophyOfTechnology #Philosophy #Ethics #AI #HumanComputerInteraction #research #academia #humanities #KI @FOKUSpublic @tuberlin @freieuniversitaet @WZB_Berlin @

New paper: Caroline Stockman (University of Winchester) examines the human-technology relationship in current uses of generative AI (GenAI) through the lens of existential philosophy. #OpenAccess via Weizenbaum Journal of the Digital Society:

➡️ https://doi.org/10.34669/wi.wjds/5.1.2

#wjds #GenerativeAI #PhilosophyOfTechnology #Philosophy #Ethics #AI #HumanComputerInteraction #research #academia #humanities #KI @FOKUSpublic @tuberlin @freieuniversitaet @WZB_Berlin @

“Digital Value” by Andrew Bailey
Exploring why digital artifacts like Bitcoin, despite being easily copied and seemingly “unreal,” hold economic value. Through a case study of Bitcoin, Bailey argues that digital items derive value from their utility and resistance to cheap replication.

https://journals.ub.uni-koeln.de/index.php/phidi/article/view/2418

#DigitalPhilosophy #Bitcoin #DigitalEconomy #PhilosophyOfTechnology

“Digital Value” by Andrew Bailey
Exploring why digital artifacts like Bitcoin, despite being easily copied and seemingly “unreal,” hold economic value. Through a case study of Bitcoin, Bailey argues that digital items derive value from their utility and resistance to cheap replication.

https://journals.ub.uni-koeln.de/index.php/phidi/article/view/2418

#DigitalPhilosophy #Bitcoin #DigitalEconomy #PhilosophyOfTechnology

Finally published:
"Technology Socialisation?"

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-662-68021-6

Including a German paper I wrote myself on LLMs and Language Use and Understanding: Plausibel, aber unwahr: Sozialisation und Wahrscheinlichkeitspapageien

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-662-68021-6_8

Kindly let me know if you do not have access but would like to read <3

#philosophy #philosophyoftechnology

Finally published:
"Technology Socialisation?"

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-662-68021-6

Including a German paper I wrote myself on LLMs and Language Use and Understanding: Plausibel, aber unwahr: Sozialisation und Wahrscheinlichkeitspapageien

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-662-68021-6_8

Kindly let me know if you do not have access but would like to read <3

#philosophy #philosophyoftechnology

This is a useful concept from Andrew Dryhurst in a recent paper in JCR. I’ve been prone to arguing for the same framing by talking about the need to historicise AI, in terms of a broader history of digitalisation then platformisation. I think Dryhurst’s framing here helps me account for how a particular framing of AI emerges both from failing to historicise it, as well as contributes to making it more difficult to do so in the future:

Traditionally, a large amount of philosophical functionalism has pervaded the AI space (Bryson Citation2019; Searle Citation1984), which has served to underpin an instrumentalist understanding of AI technology in much of the social science literature on the topic. Instrumentalism here refers to AI being understood as a tool and solely in terms of what it does. This is of course necessary at a certain level, given the wide-reaching scope of AI-use cases, the diversity of models and training sets, and the opacity that frequently surrounds AI’s societal deployment (O’Neil Citation2017). Nevertheless, instrumental notions of AI are inescapably presentist in their analytical scope, and it is important to consider that different AI are themselves embedded in an enormous variety of material relations and processes. AI are constructed and deployed by agents who are imbued with their own structural and institutional contexts, interests, ideals, and situational logics. A particular company’s AI systems are necessarily intertwined with the dynamics of (inter)national regulations, supply chains, and (national) accumulation regimes, as well as corporate agents’ reflexive and culturally conditioned actions in and through time. That is, AI are open complex systems embedded in other open complex systems.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14767430.2023.2279950#abstract

I think you can make this point without the CR vocabulary but it is a very important point which is very powerfully made here:

there is a research gap to be filled through tracing AI’s conceptual and material development in relation to the morphogenetically derived systemic imperatives traversing the political economy of the Internet and its history. For example, the ubiquitous deployment of AI models across all aspects of society presupposes questions about attribution concerning the datasets that are fed into different models; the transparency of data collection and processing; and the complex regulatory challenges that widescale AI deployment creates

And this is exactly what I’m interested in addressing, particularly the notion of models as cultural technologies, even if I arrived there through a slightly different route:

Similarly, the recursive and emergent consequences of people’s interactions with powerful AI models across industry and society make the models akin to cultural substrates from which particular worldviews may be inscribed and cultivated. To paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, the model may well be the message (Bratton and Agüera y Arcas Citation2022). All of these connote significant economic and social outcomes, and also exemplify a situation where the rise of powerful AI companies, possessive of their own intellectual property, datasets, and modelling practices, ought clearly to be situated within the accumulation imperatives and systemically persistent dynamics shaping the Internet’s development in capitalism because they are intertwined with and shaped by AI’s regulation and deployment as well.

https://markcarrigan.net/2024/08/01/against-an-instrumentalist-understanding-of-ai-critical-realism-and-conceptualising-artificial-intelligence/

#artificialIntelligence #digital #morphogenesis #MorphogeneticApproach #ontology #philosophyOfTechnology #platformisation #platfromCapitalism

This is a useful concept from Andrew Dryhurst in a recent paper in JCR. I’ve been prone to arguing for the same framing by talking about the need to historicise AI, in terms of a broader history of digitalisation then platformisation. I think Dryhurst’s framing here helps me account for how a particular framing of AI emerges both from failing to historicise it, as well as contributes to making it more difficult to do so in the future:

Traditionally, a large amount of philosophical functionalism has pervaded the AI space (Bryson Citation2019; Searle Citation1984), which has served to underpin an instrumentalist understanding of AI technology in much of the social science literature on the topic. Instrumentalism here refers to AI being understood as a tool and solely in terms of what it does. This is of course necessary at a certain level, given the wide-reaching scope of AI-use cases, the diversity of models and training sets, and the opacity that frequently surrounds AI’s societal deployment (O’Neil Citation2017). Nevertheless, instrumental notions of AI are inescapably presentist in their analytical scope, and it is important to consider that different AI are themselves embedded in an enormous variety of material relations and processes. AI are constructed and deployed by agents who are imbued with their own structural and institutional contexts, interests, ideals, and situational logics. A particular company’s AI systems are necessarily intertwined with the dynamics of (inter)national regulations, supply chains, and (national) accumulation regimes, as well as corporate agents’ reflexive and culturally conditioned actions in and through time. That is, AI are open complex systems embedded in other open complex systems.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14767430.2023.2279950#abstract

I think you can make this point without the CR vocabulary but it is a very important point which is very powerfully made here:

there is a research gap to be filled through tracing AI’s conceptual and material development in relation to the morphogenetically derived systemic imperatives traversing the political economy of the Internet and its history. For example, the ubiquitous deployment of AI models across all aspects of society presupposes questions about attribution concerning the datasets that are fed into different models; the transparency of data collection and processing; and the complex regulatory challenges that widescale AI deployment creates

And this is exactly what I’m interested in addressing, particularly the notion of models as cultural technologies, even if I arrived there through a slightly different route:

Similarly, the recursive and emergent consequences of people’s interactions with powerful AI models across industry and society make the models akin to cultural substrates from which particular worldviews may be inscribed and cultivated. To paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, the model may well be the message (Bratton and Agüera y Arcas Citation2022). All of these connote significant economic and social outcomes, and also exemplify a situation where the rise of powerful AI companies, possessive of their own intellectual property, datasets, and modelling practices, ought clearly to be situated within the accumulation imperatives and systemically persistent dynamics shaping the Internet’s development in capitalism because they are intertwined with and shaped by AI’s regulation and deployment as well.

https://markcarrigan.net/2024/08/01/against-an-instrumentalist-understanding-of-ai-critical-realism-and-conceptualising-artificial-intelligence/

#artificialIntelligence #digital #morphogenesis #MorphogeneticApproach #ontology #philosophyOfTechnology #platformisation #platfromCapitalism

Goodbye #Zürich ! I learned a lot at the workshop on #InclusiveCities and now I am off to #SSN2024 to discuss #VSD - working title of my paper: My privacy is your noise. #PhilosophyOfTechnology

That should have been #philosophyoftechnology

Exciting times as programme director of the #PSTS #MSc programme since we are working towards two new tracks (one on #AI , one in #Sustainability ) and a new #ChallengeBasedLearning thesis format at the same time. #Philosophy #philosophyoftechnology

📣 Presentation at Glücksspielsymposium #SympGS24Forschungsstelle Glücksspiel (Universität Hohenheim)

🎲 Adding to notions of #nudging and #DarkPatterns I spoke about other forms of Human-Technology Relations through #AdversarialAttacks, #Jailbreaking, and #SpecificationGaming

👾 Technical objects always afford more than what is intended by providers in their marketing logic. The spaces of possibility that lie beyond the logic of exploitation in the nature of the object indicate what will happen sooner or later in the application of technologies anyway- and the better you know your way around, the easier it is to help shape, counteract, be creative, make informed decisions and act in a self-determined way.

What's more, dealing with these things is simply a lot of fun. Thank you very much for the invitation and the positive feedback! The slides will soon be available on the University of Hohenheim website.

#genAI #objectrecognition #philosophy #philosophyoftechnology

📣 Presentation at Glücksspielsymposium #SympGS24Forschungsstelle Glücksspiel (Universität Hohenheim)

🎲 Adding to notions of #nudging and #DarkPatterns I spoke about other forms of Human-Technology Relations through #AdversarialAttacks, #Jailbreaking, and #SpecificationGaming

👾 Technical objects always afford more than what is intended by providers in their marketing logic. The spaces of possibility that lie beyond the logic of exploitation in the nature of the object indicate what will happen sooner or later in the application of technologies anyway- and the better you know your way around, the easier it is to help shape, counteract, be creative, make informed decisions and act in a self-determined way.

What's more, dealing with these things is simply a lot of fun. Thank you very much for the invitation and the positive feedback! The slides will soon be available on the University of Hohenheim website.

#genAI #objectrecognition #philosophy #philosophyoftechnology

#Anders #CritiqueOfTechnology #PhilosophyOfTechnology: "The critique of technology developed by Anders took shape as a humanist (and Marxist) Aufhebung of Heidegger’s thought, not as its pure and simple negation. The Heideggerian vision of technology as the true ontological condition of men in the modern world[37] finds an undeniable correspondence in the work of Anders. In Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, technology is perceived systematically and exclusively as a source of alienation, never appearing – like in Fourier, Marx, or Benjamin – as a possible ‘key to happiness’ for humanity.[38] Heidegger’s observation according to which ‘everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology[39] could readily have been written by his former pupil.
(...)
Anders’s distinctive philosophy was the result of a synthesis of two formative elements: a critique of technical and industrial modernity with a romantic savour, inspired by Heidegger but remodelled by a strong ethical-political sensibility, and a Marxist critique of capitalism conceived as a system of domination and alienation. Modern civilisation did not limit itself, as in the past, to excluding the Jews; it made them the designated victims of its technology of death. This sombre reflection on modernity as a catastrophe without redemption reveals the traces left on Anders’s thought by a certain Jewish tradition and gives his theses a ‘prophetic’ character. As Gershom Scholem wrote, ‘the authors of the Apocalypse always had a pessimistic view of the world. History, in their eyes, deserved only to perish’.[58] For Anders, however, as distinct from prophets of the Apocalypse, Auschwitz and Hiroshima did not seem to announce any salvation, rather the end of messianic hope. His own apocalypse had lost any eschatological dimension. All that remained was to live ‘without hope’.[59]"

https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/index.php/articles/auschwitz-and-hiroshima

#Anders #CritiqueOfTechnology #PhilosophyOfTechnology: "The critique of technology developed by Anders took shape as a humanist (and Marxist) Aufhebung of Heidegger’s thought, not as its pure and simple negation. The Heideggerian vision of technology as the true ontological condition of men in the modern world[37] finds an undeniable correspondence in the work of Anders. In Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, technology is perceived systematically and exclusively as a source of alienation, never appearing – like in Fourier, Marx, or Benjamin – as a possible ‘key to happiness’ for humanity.[38] Heidegger’s observation according to which ‘everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology[39] could readily have been written by his former pupil.
(...)
Anders’s distinctive philosophy was the result of a synthesis of two formative elements: a critique of technical and industrial modernity with a romantic savour, inspired by Heidegger but remodelled by a strong ethical-political sensibility, and a Marxist critique of capitalism conceived as a system of domination and alienation. Modern civilisation did not limit itself, as in the past, to excluding the Jews; it made them the designated victims of its technology of death. This sombre reflection on modernity as a catastrophe without redemption reveals the traces left on Anders’s thought by a certain Jewish tradition and gives his theses a ‘prophetic’ character. As Gershom Scholem wrote, ‘the authors of the Apocalypse always had a pessimistic view of the world. History, in their eyes, deserved only to perish’.[58] For Anders, however, as distinct from prophets of the Apocalypse, Auschwitz and Hiroshima did not seem to announce any salvation, rather the end of messianic hope. His own apocalypse had lost any eschatological dimension. All that remained was to live ‘without hope’.[59]"

https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/index.php/articles/auschwitz-and-hiroshima

No dia 10 de Novembro, na Universidade de Évora, acolheremos o colóquio "Crítica da Civilização Tecnológica e Trabalho Humano", organizado por João Príncipe, José Luís Garcia e Diogo Silva da Cunha.

ℹ️ https://ihc.fcsh.unl.pt/events/critica-civilizacao-tecnologica/

#Histodons #Philosophy #Technology #AI #Labour #CriticalThinking #Civilization #TechAndLabour #PhilosophyOfTechnology #Tecnologia #Trabalho #Civilização

Are you or do you know of any philosophers in the Fediverse doing philosophy of technology? #philosophy #philosophyoftechnology

Looking forward to welcoming our new #students in the #PSTS #MSc programme at 11:00 😀 It's always exciting and inspiring to meet the next generation of #PhilosophyOfTechnology and #STS scholars :) @utwente

Any interaction design, hci scholar has applied Gilbert Simondon's work for their research?

#philosophyoftechnology #sts #design #hci #ixd #mediatheory

#AI #Weizenbaum #Chatbots #PhilosophyOfTechnology: "Artificial intelligence, he came to believe, was an “index of the insanity of our world.”

Today, the view that artificial intelligence poses some kind of threat is no longer a minority position among those working on it. There are different opinions on which risks we should be most worried about, but many prominent researchers, from Timnit Gebru to Geoffrey Hinton – both ex-Google computer scientists – share the basic view that the technology can be toxic. Weizenbaum’s pessimism made him a lonely figure among computer scientists during the last three decades of his life; he would be less lonely in 2023.

There is so much in Weizenbaum’s thinking that is urgently relevant now. Perhaps his most fundamental heresy was the belief that the computer revolution, which Weizenbaum not only lived through but centrally participated in, was actually a counter-revolution. It strengthened repressive power structures instead of upending them. It constricted rather than enlarged our humanity, prompting people to think of themselves as little more than machines. By ceding so many decisions to computers, he thought, we had created a world that was more unequal and less rational, in which the richness of human reason had been flattened into the senseless routines of code.

Weizenbaum liked to say that every person is the product of a particular history. His ideas bear the imprint of his own particular history, which was shaped above all by the atrocities of the 20th century and the demands of his personal demons. Computers came naturally to him. The hard part, he said, was life."

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jul/25/joseph-weizenbaum-inventor-eliza-chatbot-turned-against-artificial-intelligence-ai

#Introduction : I just moved to this server. I am a #Philosopher working at the @utwente at the intersection of #PhiloosophyOfTheCity and #PhilosophyOfTechnology . I have a special interest in #design and, thus, are part of the #SiG #DesignEthics in the #DesignResearch society, and - finally - I am interested in the role of #AI and #Robotics in #cities and in #HumanitarianAid .

SPT 23 in Tokyo was great. If you haven't heard Japanese scholars speak on your topic of interest, I highly recommend it. What I heard was so craftfully precise, matters taken so deeply serious, even in a second or third language, it made me feel like philosophy is a graceful and important thing after all.

Thanks to all the people providing this incredibly warm seriousness about content, but also interpersonally.

Thanks Mark Thomas Young & @coeckelbergh for a great panel on Process Philosophy and thanks John Sullins for reminding us to be more like Jacques Ellul.

Finally, thankful that I could take my children with me and they behaved (almost entirely) well during my presentations, exploring the streets of Tokyo, or just waiting in front of the room discussing Marxism (rly :D) and their favourite accents of people speaking. Thankful I could show them a tiny fraction of what work looks like for me.

#philosophyoftechnology

I totally fell in love with Lewis Mumford's #essay on "Authoritarian and Democratic Technics"

A timeless piece on how the insatiable, ideological drive behind Science and Tech has created a system that strips us away from our humanity & disconnects us from each other.

His solution? Redesign tech & cut the system back so that there's space for our human autonomy and intervention.

Also a good #DIY + tech manifesto; and great prose 🖤

#philosophy #philosophyoftechnology
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3101118

hi everyone; here's my short #introduction ⤵️

I'm an engineer & philosopher of technology who works as a researcher & lecturer at the University of Twente (the Netherlands).

I'm also a community-based #climate and #environmental activist.

My work centers on the intersection of Internet use and the climate movement.

+ info about my research:
https://patyt.net/research/
https://people.utwente.nl/p.d.reyes

#philosophy #philosophyoftechnology #ethicsoftechnology #academic #activism #climatechange