Hopster lists among the potential targets of technologically induced social disruption ‘social relations, institutions, epistemic paradigms, foundational concepts, values, and the very nature of human cognition and experience’ (2021, 1). This is quite a heterogeneous list; it is not immediately obvious what unifies these objects as potential targets of disruption, if anything.

In my talk, I will examine Radder’s notion of public interest with respect to technologies with long-term effects, such as nuclear waste disposal. Radder proposes two criteria for public interest, namely the degree of inclusiveness of affected people and the quality of democratic decision-making. Both criteria are difficult, if not impossible, to meet with respect to technologies with long-term health and safety impacts.

The emerging technoscience of quantum technology (QT) will have a considerable impact on society. However, a broader public dialogue on societal impact and possible ethical issues of QT is currently lacking. This may relate to the fact that first, existing approaches to public engagement such as Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) often focus upon reasoning and argumentation, and second, that outreach is usually developed in a top-down setting. How could we encourage a public dialogue?

Collective attention plays an important role in the development of sociotechnical systems. It directs the aggregation of social, financial, and political resources, which impacts technology development. In particular, shifts in collective attention can reflect changing relationships between specific technologies and social or moral values. When a value is relatively more important to a certain technology, the perspectives relevant to that value attract more attention within that specific technical system, which is crucial for value-sensitive and responsible technology design.

“The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, to whom it occurred to say this is mine, and found people sufficiently simple to believe him was the true founder of civil society.” This iconic saying of Jean-Jacques Rousseau does not address the foundation of civil society as a celebrated event in the speculative history of the humankind. For Rousseau, it is rather a catastrophic turn in that it has sown the seeds of inequality among human beings. The question whether the commons that came to be partitioned among humans led to a better societal life remains unresolved.

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.

This paper focuses on robotic art practices as a complementary perspective to ongoing discussions in ethics and philosophy of technology on the potentially disruptive impacts of emerging technologies such as social robots and AI. Art, through its ability to foster alternative perspectives and moral reflections, provides a unique approach to analyzing the design, use, and social meaning or implications of new technologies such as robots, thus enabling speculative theorization that extends beyond the dominant narratives emerging from robotics research and development.

Artistic approaches and performative explorations enable innovative ways to design human-robot interactions (HRI) by providing new perspectives and embodied understandings of how humans relate to technology (Gemeinboeck, 2021). We understand dance as an inherently dynamic and interactive process of alignment and, therefore, chose an explorative approach that builds on performative experiments between human performers and a social robot. Our investigations aim to understand how both parties enact their interwovenness in improvisational situations and what interdependencies emerge.

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.

This paper proposes a new normative framework to think about Big Tech reform. Focusing on the case of digital communication, I argue that rethinking the corporate purpose of social media companies is a distinctive entry point to the debate on how to render the powers of tech corporations democratically legitimate. I contend that we need to strive for a reform that redefines the corporate purpose of social media companies. In this view, their purpose should be to create and maintain a free, egalitarian, and democratic public sphere rather than profit seeking.

In the past decades the post-phenomenological tradition has proposed the technological mediation framework (Verbeek, 2011) as a scheme to reflect upon how people use, misuse, reclaim and overall experience technology (Idhe, 1990).

Within mere decades the attention economy has not only developed into an technological omnipresence, a major industry and a political force to be reckoned with. Less explicitly I has also developed into a major moral force working on our collective attention. It does not only come with an explicit economical deal - I pay attention in return for ‘free’ services - but also with an implicit ethical ideal: delivering myself to the ease of attention technology will confirm me as a truly modern human being. The good and the easy are near synonyms.

Digital platforms increasingly mediate social, economic, and other forms of human interactions, which puts them in a position to influence the power dynamics and moral values that shape these interactions. This paper focuses on the platform and sharing economy – an economic model, in which digital platforms facilitate social and economic interactions. Its two central models, mainstream and cooperative platforms, offer similar applications and services. However, they fundamentally differ in aspects such as ownership and governance structures, economic models, and technical designs.

This paper addresses the topic of artificial mediated agency and autonomy and its impact on human wellbeing. The key question of this paper is whether artificial agency and autonomy can be extended to the notion of wisdom: If agency is mediated and distributed between humans and intelligent machines, can there also be a mediated wisdom?

Moral progress and technological progress do not necessarily go hand in hand. The twentieth century is a prime example in this regard. According to various commentators (Mitcham 1994; Ihde 1990; Verbeek 2011), the atrocious two world wars and the growing environmental impact of technological societies spread among many postwar philosophers a critical view of modern technology. Certainly, material progress (mainly produced thanks to economic and scientific-technological advancement) does not equate to progress towards a more humane world.

Nudges, tweaks in choice environments that predictably steer behavior without restricting options, can be either self-regarding (benefiting the nudgee) or other-regarding (other aims such as organ donation, charity, tax compliance). Other-regarding nudges, on which we focus here, have been claimed to preserve moral worth and participate in cultivating moral virtues.

Philosophers have been interested in how technological change can drive changes in values and many have also proposed that particular causal histories can vindicate or debunk our confidence in certain values. For either inquiry we need robust evidence of technologically induced value change and of the causal mechanisms behind it. In my paper I offer such evidence of technology-driven value change and propose a vindicating argument for this value.

“Technosocial disruption” affects “deeply held beliefs, values, social norms, and basic human capacities”, “basic human practices, fundamental concepts, [and] ontological distinctions” (Hopster 2021: 6). For this reason, it is also referred to as “deep disruption” (ibid.). It brings about different kinds of uncertainty, including “conceptual ambiguity and contestation, moral confusion, and moral disagreement” (ibid.: 7). Among such deep disruptions are disruptions of fundamental concepts.

Modern life is characterised by a shared belief that we are moving forward, that ‘we’ – that is, humanity – are progressing to a better life. Even those people who demonstrate to point at the serious global problems we are currently facing – and there are still many of these, such as climate change, war, pandemics, racism, and social injustice – appear to entertain the belief that we can divert potential catastrophes if we are willing to act.

Naturalistic moral epistemologists have recently argued that there are distinct social factors and forces under which moral progress – or regress – are likely to occur. According to Smyth (in prep.) current technological trends in many societies are conducive to moral regress: whereas once technology freed humans and encouraged the formation of new ends and experiences, much of it now forces humans down conditioning pathways where we end up pursuing remarkably simple and uniform goals. In this presentation I criticize Smyth’s assessment on three philosophical grounds.

I will assess Radder’s reconstruction of the bridges between (Philosophy of) Science and (Philosophy of) Technology, and especially his terminological choice to refer to ‘application-oriented’ science. In doing so, I explore divergence and convergence with my terminological choice to rehabilitate ‘techno-science’. In this exercise, I explain the relevance for conceptual, practical, and axiological considerations, also beyond the case of the natural sciences that occupies a large part of Radder’s book.

In my talk, I want to discuss Radder´s description of commodification as it relates to technology. By using the examples drawn from the practice of patenting research, he is able to empirically trace the multiple ways that commodification concretely shapes sociotechnical decisions and actions. Commodification is also a critical concept against which one can articulate alternatives to measure, compare, and judge sociotechnical intentions; in Radder´s case the common good and public interest are these concepts.

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