Clinical decision-making is being supported by machine learning models. So-called decision-support systems (DSS) are intended to improve the decision-making of human operators (e.g., physicians), but they also introduce issues of epistemic uncertainty and over-reliance, and thereby open up responsibility gaps. To overcome these shortcomings, explainable AI attempts to provide insights into how the system made a decision. Explanations are, however, provided post-hoc and require contextual interpretation.

Advanced neurotechnology applications record brain signals, process them, and use the data output to control software or hardware, make predictions about brain activity more generally, or as input for machine learning applications. Especially as it converges with artificial intelligence, neurotechnology is increasingly developing along lines aiming to produce ‘mind reading’ applications (e.g. Tang et al., 2023). Neuroethical responses to these developments often centre on assessing the veracity of mind reading claims (e.g.

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.

I am interested in exploring here the significance of the sense of touch in relation to human/personal identity. I will be using, however, an unusual angle, namely sex-bots and their place in human sexuality. 

While I may not have a firm position on the use of sex-bots, I certainly do not belong to the group of AI enthusiasts who believe that having sex with robots/AI is unproblematic and/or desirable. My own take on that is informed by the feminist outlook on gender imbalance when it comes to sexual relations. 

Before a technical-object enters an instrumental practice (to fulfill a task it is designed to), it exists in a period of research and development. However, the same technical-object at a developmental stage in a modelling practice carries an identity starkly distinct from the identity it embodies in instrumental practices. The technical-object as a model is valued not just by how adequately it fulfills the task it is designed to, but also by the different theoretical resourses it is dependent on and the choices made by the modeler at different stages during its development.

The paper delves into the intersection of virtue ethics, postphenomenology, and technology to explore the roles ethical virtues may play in technological design. It employs the neo-Aristotelian praxeological methodology from Alasdair MacIntyre, focusing on the virtues of the moral agent as an independent practical reasoner but also as a socially and biologically dependent animal. It also integrates contributions from Ihde’s and Verbeek’s Postphenomenology, which explore morally and technologically mediated agents. 

One of the big shifts in healthcare caused by so-called disruptive innovations in healthcare powered by AI and big data, is a shift from diagnostic and curative healthcare to predictive and preventive healthcare. While preventive healthcare is almost exclusively cloaked in positive attributes, we need to maintain semantic clarity about what it can and cannot deliver, so that patients are not misguided about its benefits and limitations and can make well-informed decisions regarding their healthcare.

A problematic issue in the ethics of technology is the relationship between action and habit, connecting human and technical, and individual and social dimensions at once. This issue poses a challenge for current ethical proposals, which tend to emphasise the individual or the social in their relation with technologies (their design and use). French philosopher Henry Bergson's notions of image and memory can be helpful in this issue.

Social media platforms often function as repositories of our past selves by confronting us with our digital traces and what these say about who we used to be. The digital traces we leave all over the Internet, such as posts and images, comments, and reposts on social media, help us realize just how much we have changed in time.

In Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory (Luhmann, 1995), society is characterized by an array of functionally differentiated subsystems comprising of communication. Included among these subsystems are the scientific subsystem, the technological subsystem, the moral subsystem and so on. Each of these subsystems is unique and conceives of problems in society by making use of their own logic, resulting in a situation where each subsystem presents different solutions to problems in society.

In an influential paper, Verbeek has suggested to expand the (post-)phenomenological repertoire of describing human-technology relations with the cyborg relation to capture what is at stake when “the human and the technological actually merge rather than ‘merely’ being embodied” (Verbeek, 2008, p. 391). According to Verbeek, a new entity emerges when humans use implanted technologies such as neurotechnology, antidepressants, or pacemakers.

Innovations that have been regarded as disruptive in the medical realm, such as mHealth applications, or machine learning, are perceived as part of a positive shift towards a more preventive, participatory and affordable healthcare model. More recently, several contributions have started exploring the ecological impacts of disruptive innovations in healthcare. New principles have been developed concerning sustainable development and use of technology in health care.

I will present a brief overview of the background and general approach taken in the book, in line with the description of the topic sketched above. It aims to provide more information about the content of the book to the audience, and so offers the commentators more time to develop their views on the claims and issues they have chosen to discuss.

Part of the panel A Book Symposium on Hans Radder’s "From Commodification to the Common Good: Reconstructing Science, Technology, and Society