In this paper I will explore different notions of ‘environment’ to conduct an analysis of its current explanatory and descriptive power. By utilizing concepts from Philosophy of Technology, concretely from Postphenomenology (Ihde 1990; Verbeek 2006), I aim to illuminate the non-neutral role of everyday tools, media, infrastructure, and technological systems and to highlight their existential and pragmatic relevance for human-environment relations.

Technology today is increasingly global, in the double sense that it is to be found all around the globe, and that it increasingly depends on global networks of production and information exchange. But what exactly is this globe, and how does technology relate to it? Is the globe on which globalisation occurred in the twentieth century the same planet which geo-engineering and sustainable technologies mean to preserve in the twenty-first century? In this article, we first consider the conditions of possibility for technological globalisation.

In recent years, it has become clear that social media platforms routinely employ self-learning algorithms to select the content and advertisements shown to users. These algorithms are trained to maximise users’ time spent on the platform in question and/or their likelihood to click on advertisements, often on the basis of personal data extracted form users’ online behaviour. There has been growing concern that such ‘timeline curation’ algorithms may influence users’ behaviour in morally problematic ways, but the grounds for this moral concern (if any) are not always clear.

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.

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.

If the challenges AI introduces to the classroom are to be addressed adequately, and educational care deployed effectively in the process, a considerable burden of responsibility and additional work is likely to be placed upon the teachers. However, teachers are already overburdened in their professional capacities (Stacey et al. 2023); adding to their workload could have negative effect not only on their performance but also on the performance of the whole educational system (Creagh et al. 2023). What is more, AI might come to disrupt education not only in terms of workplace efficiency.

Considering the societal impact of artifacts from the early stages of design is crucial for realizing a better society. While humanities such as the philosophy of technology and applied ethics have accumulated knowledge about the social aspects of technologies, this knowledge is rarely referenced in actual technological development.

In this presentation, I will argue that the responsibility gap arising from new AI systems is reducible to the problem of many hands and collective agency. Systematic analysis of the agential dimension of AI will lead me to outline a disjunctive between the two problems. Either we reduce individual responsibility gaps to the many hands, or we abandon the individual dimension and accept the possibility of responsible collective agencies.

In recent virtue ethics literature, attempts at explaining certain virtues in greater details have become of interest. We see this attempt as an answer to broad-range criticism on virtue ethics as not being action guiding. At the same time, virtues ethics finds a renewed interest in the ethics of technology (Bergen and Robaey, 2022). We find a point of tension in the virtue of curiosity and the practice of research and innovation.

Calling something ‘objective’ typically implies praise. Developers and some users of algorithmic decision-support systems often advertise such systems as making more objective judgments than humans. Objectivity, here, serves as a marker for epistemic authority. Such epistemic authority is desirable if we are to rely on algorithms for decisions. It signals that we can trust an algorithm’s judgment. By calling an algorithm objective, therefore, we promote its trustworthiness. The opposite is equally true: those who deny that algorithms are objective (see e.g.

The field of AI ethics is said to be dominated by principilism approaches. Still, bridging the gap between theoretical and often ambiguous principles and their practical operationalization remains a challenge. Simultaneously, there are growing calls from within the field to include a more virtue ethics approach to AI ethics, focusing on cultivating practical wisdom in AI practitioners, without abandoning principles completely. Several approaches have been proposed, but empirical evaluations regarding their implementation and effects in practice are still lacking.

Real-world experimentation is an important strategy for developing robust and responsible emerging technologies such as AI, robotics, and smart city applications. While real-world experimentation might benefit the development of responsible digital technologies or help solve ‘grand challenges,’ attention should be paid to conducting these experiments responsibly. However, the moral responsibilities of this real-world experimentation are often left unaddressed and unregulated.

The paper analyses the impact of persuasive technologies (PTs) on moral agency. PTs, being based on profiling and targeting techniques, direct users’ choices towards predetermined sets of options. One widely shared view is that by implying a decrease in the diversity of available information, PTs manipulate individuals by jeopardizing their moral agency, precisely constraining their epistemic and moral autonomy. This paper instead argues that PTs are not morally problematic per se but only when they threaten consciousness, one of the necessary conditions of our moral agency (Himma 2009).

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.

Anticipation is increasingly seen as a valuable methodological dimension for promoting responsible science, technology and innovation (STI) practices. Normative approaches or frameworks such as "anticipatory governance," "anticipatory ethics," "responsible innovation," "responsible research and innovation," or "technology assessment" recognize that engagements with representations of the future are valuable means for fostering critique and/or reflection on emerging technologies and innovations that may have a potentially socially disruptive character.

Navigating the digital world is highly mediated by AI-powered systems that select information and arrange options purportedly to support our decision-making and to improve our choices. But these systems can also be used for manipulative purposes. Besides straightforwardly deceptive means such as the so-called »dark patterns«, AI-powered systems can also employ subtler means to influence people’s behaviour.

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).

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).

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.

If artificial intelligence agents are capable of being conscious or experiencing subjective well-being, it seems plausible that we should offer them moral consideration (Bostrom & Yudkowsky, 2014; Anthis & Harris, 2021). However, the hard problem of consciousness remains a major challenge in understanding the nature of genuine consciousness in AI (Chalmers, 1995).

Recent advances in artificial intelligence (e.g., machine learning, generative AI) have led to an increased interest in its application in educational settings. AI companies hope to revolutionise teaching and learning by tailoring material to the individual needs of students, automating parts of teachers’ jobs, or analyse educational data to optimise the delivery of content. The main goal of this presentation is to consider the role of imaginaries in shaping concrete practices and understandings of educational AI. 

Piloting and pilots are a key element in innovation policy. The European Union innovation policy steers funding for projects leaning on piloting through its research and innovation programmes, and the experimental approach is also embedded in its policies on emerging technologies. At the same time, all research and innovation funding through the EU mechanisms subscribe to the principles of Responsible Research and Innovation that guide practises concerning co-creation and transdisciplinary interaction. 

In this paper, I draw on pragmatist philosophy to assess the impact of educational AI (AIED) on the democratic dimension of education. AIED is expected to facilitate teaching and learning by personalizing content to the needs of students, automating parts of teachers’ jobs, and monitoring students’ performance and behavior, among others. However, I argue that we should pay close attention to AIED’s impact on the social development of students and the civic values and attitudes it is going to promote.

"Destination Earth", or in short "DestinE" is a project of the European Commission that aims to develop of a Digital Twin of planet Earth: a highly accurate data-driven digital representation that is expected to monitor and predict the interaction between natural phenomena and human activity. This Digital Twin is expected to inform and support Europe's environmental governance. However, every representation reflects a certain approach to reality, thereby giving certain actors power over claims to reality, materialising world-views, and opening up certain futures, while closing off others.

In our quest for human happiness and well-being we have taken the needs and wants of one biological species as the only frame of reference for a place that is inhabited by millions of species. Our super ability to collaborate, the strict or absolute separation between us and nature (Lent, 2022) and the dominance of the reductionist way of thinking have already closed off a pathway where we would focus on abundance and equality.

Scientists are adopting genetics and genomics technologies for wide-ranging conservation objectives, ranging from biodiversity monitoring, translocations, assisted evolution, gene drives and de-extinction. These data-driven technologies rely on the mass digitization of biodiversity data across the world and constitute the Fourth Paradigm of biodiversity science. While enhancing human understanding of biodiversity loss and capacities to deal with it, technologies have large ethical implications (Daño & Prato, 2019). 

Global warming and the consequent ecological crisis driving soil degradation and biodiversity loss are making painfully clear our lack of understanding and appreciation of the environmental costs of technological modernization. The current ecological predicament has encouraged the promotion of sustainable development and the rise of nature-based technologies and ecological design practices.

The success story of generative AI has been driven by the availability of vast datasets. Now, researchers are led to explore synthetic training data to address data availability challenges. Synthetic data can also purportedly help address ethical concerns such as privacy violations, authorship rights, and algorithmic bias. However, there is a glaring research gap on the ethics of synthetic data as such. This paper investigates the normative foundations of using synthetic data to address bias in AI, focusing on generative models.