Medical technology, robotics, human-brain interfaces, and generative AI disrupt the human being and raise anew the anthropological question of what a human being is. What sets humans apart from technology? What can we still do, what technology cannot or will not be able to do? How we understand the human is (often unnoticed) the basis of many ethical assertions. We presuppose consciousness, agency, autonomy, and intelligence and contemplate whether we can also attribute them to technology.
In this talk, I will 1) examine which conceptions of the human being are already embedded in technology. I argue that technology not only transforms humans but also contains concepts of the human being already embedded within it. These concepts are highly limited and do not reflect the diversity of human beings, for example, they assume a specific notion of a functional body or are influenced by a colonial concept of the human. A central point, as I argue, is that they all do not sufficiently perceive humans as relational beings, entangled with the non-human such as animals and technology.
In the second step, I inquire into how we can rethink the philosophical anthropology of technology. The anthropological approach I propose is paradoxically not human-centered, as the name “anthropology” suggests, but rather places the non-human and our relationships with the non-human at the forefront. Concerning the non-human, I focus on animals and robots and compare the relationships we have with them, thus intertwining environmental ethics and ethics of technology.
In this endeavor, I employ a phenomenological approach, drawing upon New Materialism/Posthumanism (Haraway, Barad), and engage with the decolonial work of Sylvie Wynter.

Literature:

Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press.
Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press.
McKittrick, K., & Wynter, S. (2015). Sylvia Wynter: On being human as praxis. Duke University Press. 
Verbeek, P. P. (2005). What things do: Philosophical reflections on technology, agency, and design. Penn State University Press.
Wynter, S. (2003). Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument. CR: The New Centennial Review, 3(3), 257-337.