In traditional research on the relationship between human and technology, agency has always been a concept that has attracted much attention. Starting from Aristotle, agency is considered as an agent’s initiative in action. Since Giddens defined agency as the power of change, material agency has emerged.

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.

In recent years, ‘human-centered artificial intelligence’ (HCAI) has emerged as a dominant framing device in contemporary AI discourse and policy. However, alongside its widespread acceptance, the phrase has received criticism. One type of critique levied against HCAI attacks its tendency towards anthropocentrism, claiming that by taking human well-being as the focus of moral considerations, HCAI is ill-equipped for addressing the harms that AI technologies pose to nonhuman animals and other elements of the natural world.

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. 

The contemporary societal shift towards virtuality entails not a form of disembodiment for the individual, a shift away from the material, but rather an intensification and modification in the field of immanence. The intentional threads that exist between the world and the individual are mutated through continous technological engagement and this, the current paper argues, reveals embodiment itself to be an iterative technological process.

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.

A major concern in AI ethics is that Machine Learning systems impose determinability on human lives that are fundamentally indeterminable (Birhane, 2021). The introduction of AI and algorithmic decision-making brings with it the risk that rigid machine-like decision-making will make it impossible to make the exceptions that will inevitably be required to their output, and that categories of people who are often overlooked or omitted will not be taken into consideration by them (Star & Bowker, 2007).

Locked-In Syndrome (LIS) is a condition in which someone is (almost) completely paralyzed but has intact cognition and consciousness (American Congress of Rehabilitation Medicine, 1995; Bauer et al., 1979). This condition profoundly shapes a person’s embodied ‘being toward the world’ (Carel, 2013; Merleau-Ponty, 1945/2012). Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) are devices that can be controlled with brain activity (Kübler, 2020). The promise of BCIs is to ‘restore’ the communicational ablilities of people with LIS (Metzger et al., 2023).

Contemporary ethics of technology tends to focus on how emerging technologies may threaten what we hold to be ethically valuable, or, if done in a more reflective way, how these values themselves may not only be disrupted but also creatively transformed. Although Bernard Stiegler never engaged in this kind of research, his approach can be interpreted as implicitly concerned with how human values, and the value of humanity itself, are created and historically transformed in inevitable and defining relation to technology.

In this presentation, the Human Condition Line presents the outcome of a collaborative research project on vulnerability. 

Digital technologies are becoming intimately interwoven with our society and our individual daily lives. As these technologies are transforming and reconfiguring people's cognitive, affective, bodily and conative capacities, there is a growing interest in the field of responsible computing in how this entanglement of human life with digital technology requires analyses that foreground human vulnerability.

Our research reevaluates postphenomenological theory by focusing on the often-neglected aspects of technological malfunctions and failures. We introduce concepts to scrutinize these critical facets, suggesting that postphenomenology inadequately addresses the significance of malfunctioning devices. Understanding these failures, we argue, is essential to fully appreciate the societal impact of disruptive technologies. This analysis aims to enrich postphenomenology and encourage further exploration into human-technology interactions.

In this talk I will provide an answer to the following question: how do sex robots confirm Lacanian psychoanalytic conceptions of (sexual) objectification and subjectivity that condition sexual relations with human others as well as with robots? 
A Lacanian understanding of sexual relations is predicated on the aphorism that the sexual relation does not exist: objectification is conditional for any (sexual) relation to take place since it is only possible to encounter human and robotic others as partial objects and never as whole entities or full subjects. 

Much of our world is imperceptible to us – “us” being humans. “Umwelt,” originally proposed by Jakob Johann von Uexküll, describes the world as experienced by an individual organism. Our worlds are both composed and limited by what we are capable of sensing. Our limitations have been exploited to generate invisible conveniences such as sonar and wireless technologies. However, we are not the only occupants of the planet and what is invisible to us has proven time after time to be harmfully present to our fellow species.

Several researchers have argued that the online environment makes people (especially women) more vulnerable to objectification. In this talk I argue that this is a special case of what I call technological objectification: the way in which technologies enable to treat oneself or someone else as an object. The aim of this talk is twofold. On the one hand, I suggest that technological objectification comes in degrees, and that arguably not every form of objectification is (equally) problematic.

Postphenomenology’s recognition that technological artifacts play an active role in our lives by mediating our experiences and actions in the world has proved a powerful perspective for the analysis of what things do. Part of this consists of bringing to light theretofore un(der)recognized ethical impacts of specific technologies. However, when it comes to then informing us on what to do in light of those developments, postphenomenological theorizing has been relatively silent, i.e., steps towards developing an ‘ethics of technological mediation’ have been limited.