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.

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.

Healthcare faces increasing challenges from aging populations, chronic illnesses, and emergent health crises. The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into healthcare systems promises revolutionary changes across diagnosis, treatment planning, patient monitoring, and administrative tasks. However, amidst these technological advancements, the development and implementation of AI systems often overlook the critical role of emotional practices within the healthcare field.

Data-intensive health research projects led or initiated by large tech companies, such as Alphabet and Palantir, are emblematic of a research model Sharon (2016) has termed the “Googlization of Health Research” (GHR). GHR, according to Sharon, is characterized by a promise to advance health research through collection of a large variety of heterogeneous data, such as through consumer-oriented tracking devices, as well as offering technological capabilities to effectively manage and analyze this complex data.

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.

The integration of disruptive technologies in healthcare has ushered in a new era of innovation and advancement, promising transformative solutions to longstanding challenges in patient care. However, amidst the potential benefits lies a pressing concern: data privacy. This abstract explores the intricate landscape of data privacy within the context of disruptive technology and health, with a particular emphasis on elucidating the responsible entities accountable for safeguarding sensitive medical information.

‘Proper function’ theories commit to the notion that artefacts possess functions that are ontologically ‘proper’ to them, and that these functions are assigned at artefact creation. According to these theories, proper functions play a crucial role in shaping our collective understanding of technological artefacts. Proper functions not only help us to determine what a given artefact is, but also offer normative benchmarks for whether artefacts are working ‘properly’.

The growing focus on repair and maintenance in philosophy of technology, urges, among other things, an attention to technologies through time, that is, how they persist, are worked on, are re-designed and reimagined over the duration of their use (Young, 2020; Steinert, forthcoming). It is the relevance that this perspective has for the built environment in times of climate change and environmental disruption that I develop in this presentation.

Since the publication of Winner’s influential article in 1980, the idea that artifacts have politics has remained a dominant theme in STS and the philosophy of technology. Yet despite exploring the political nature of artifacts from a variety of different perspectives, little of this work has paid attention to the activity of maintenance.

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

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.