AI and other forms of digital tech are profoundly changing legal contexts. These changes come in various sorts. AI can support and replace judicial processes, but it can also profoundly disrupt existing judicial practices and values ( Sourdin 2015). In my talk, I am interested in AI’s disruptive effects. Specifically,I will argue that AI used for adjudication purposes has the potential to disrupt the law as a site of moral perceptual progress.

Recently, a number of studies have shown that chatbots are outperforming healthcare professionals when it comes to empathy (Ayers et al., 2023; Lenharo, 2024). This is remarkable for at least two reasons. First, insofar as empathy is broadly recognized as a core value of good healthcare (Kim et al., 2004). Second, because empathy has typically been considered an essentially human quality, whereby the promise of technology in healthcare, including most recently AI, has been to free up healthcare professionals to do what they are good at: providing empathetic care (Topol, 2019).

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. 

Adapting ethical frameworks such as value sensitive design (VSD) and ethics by design (EbD) to the specificity of AI systems (Umbrello and van de Poel, 2021; Brey and Dainow, 2023) can be seen as a recent attempt to systematically respond to the more general ideas of AI for Social Good (Floridi et al., 2020) or AI alignment (Dung, 2023). Despite the differences among these frameworks, the motivation stems from the same challenge—to ensure that AI systems promote, bring about or perform desirable ethical values through their own design.

Discussions of the welfare of non-human animals & artificial intelligence are dominated by two principles: pathocentrism & the precautionary principle. Pathocentrism is the view that a being’s moral status depends on its capacity to suffer (Metzinger 2021). Pathocentrism establishes a vital connection between philosophical/scientific investigations of consciousness & ethical/legal frameworks. Yet, it also leaves important questions unanswered– chief among them: /which/ beings are capable of suffering?

This article explores the identity and role of engineers through the lens of care ethics. Building on other attempts to develop engineering ethics based on normative moral perspectives that are similar to and consistent with the ethics of care (e.g., virtue ethics), we propose that engineering practices within small and medium scale projects present the conditions for developing moral relations based on care.

We live in a time of rapid, global, and long-lasting environmental and technological changes. On the one hand, technological innovation is a major driver of environmental degradation, as illustrated by the pollution caused by agricultural pesticides, ozone layer depletion caused by chlorofluorocarbons, greenhouse gas emissions caused by fossil fuel combustion, and the radioactive waste of nuclear power plants.

Under the looming specter of mass extinction and escalating climate change, life itself becomes the terrain of various justice struggles. As philosopher Eva von Redecker notes, many recent social justice movements, including climate (“Extinction Rebellion”), feminist (“Ni una menos”), anti-racist (“I can’t breathe”) and Indigenous (“Water is life”) mobilizations explicitly make reference to the politics of life. At the same time, technological developments in the life sciences challenge traditional philosophical accounts of the very meaning of life.

In this paper, I examine the current scope of human-AI friendships, and the prospects for near-future development of more sophisticated AI friends. I argue that in some current and many possible future contexts, these friendships can be valuable – good for the humans who have them. But there are significant risks attached to the shifting of the concept of friendship, from being primarily a relationship between humans, to the kind of relationship that at least some humans have, not with other humans but with our technological creations.  

“Youper: an empathetic, safe, and clinically validated chatbot for mental healthcare.” (Youper, n.d.) This slogan is used for the marketing campaign of therapy bot Youper, a chatbot that mimics psychotherapy, or at least uses methods of therapeutic practices to improve users’ mental health (Fulmer et al., 2018). Other examples are Woebot (Woebot, n.d.) and Wysa (Wysa, n.d.). Most therapy bots are based on the theory and practice of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT). Marketing campaigns of these therapy bots mention that they have “empathy”.

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.

The planetary boundary framework defines a ‘safe operating space for humanity’ that requires staying within certain biophysical boundaries of the Earth system (Rockström et al., 2009). Recently, Earth system scientists and social scientists have proposed to complement these biophysical boundaries with ‘just Earth system boundaries’, which encompass three dimensions of justice – intragenerational justice, intergenerational justice, and interspecies justice (the ‘3I approach’) – that are brought together under the concept of ‘planetary justice’ (Gupta et al., 2023).

In recent years, the concept of "smart cities" has emerged as a futuristic vision for urban development, driven by the integration of digital technologies into urban infrastructure and services. However, this approach often neglects fundamental considerations about the human and societal impact of technology on urban life. This study proposes a critical reflection on the intersections between the ideals of smart cities and the philosophy of technology, while exploring the concepts of the city of proximity and the city of caring, outlined by Ezio Manzini (2019, 2022).

Mainstream media report that governments and business leaders see AI as an "extinction-level threat" to humans[1,2,3]. In post-humanism, we find, besides conceptional tools for thinking technology in an indeterministic way[4,5,6] argumentations for singularity[7], accelerationism[8] and appeasement[9] towards *strong AI*.

The drawing view of friendship claims that friendship is a matter of two individuals being able to mutually understand each other, that they come to know themselves better, and ultimately shape their own identities in response to their friendship. There has been some discussion as to whether friendships developed over the internet, via social media, email, or text messaging, or other forms of digital communication can meet these conditions for friendship.

AI tools replace or stand to replace human activity with non-human activity, via automated decision-making, recommender systems and content generation. The more AI replaces valuable human activity, the more it risks deskilling humans of their human capacities. While others have warned of moral deskilling caused by AI-warfare and social robotics, I argue that deskilling encompasses other valuable capacities such as the epistemic, social, creative, physical and the capacity to will.

Large language models utilized for basic talk therapy, often referred to as mental health chatbots, are frequently personalized based on user interactions or other input. While personalization could improve the patient’s experience, it could also pose a risk to their autonomy through, for example, the inappropriate use of personalized nudges.

In quantum technologies such as quantum computing, quantum sensing and quantum communication, engineers are working towards ingenious ways in which quantum states can be created, manipulated, exploited, and read out. However, how to comprehend the nature of such quantum states physically and metaphysically is far from obvious. With this development of quantum technologies gaining traction in recent decades, an argument can be made for the renewed importance of working towards a better understanding of both the physical and conceptual reality upon which these technologies rest.

As quantum technologies (QT) continue to progress and mature, the need to establish an ethical framework for their development becomes increasingly apparent. This urgency is emphasized by QT's significant geopolitical and corporate value, with global actors increasingly investing considerable resources into the technology.

In this contribution, I set out an argument for an approach to quantum ethics that takes into account the importance of the attribution of ‘meaning’ to a new technology (cf. Grunwald, 2017). Ethical debates and debates about responsibility emerge from the intertwining of scientific expectations or projections and their possible social meanings. Meanings can be considered a form of intervention; while they do not necessarily fix the meaning of the technology under discussion, they can still have real impact on how debates are carried out.

In this contribution I argue that non-physicist expert citizens play an active role in giving meaning to quantum technologies.