Smart Environments: Exploring the Implications of the Next Step in Ecosystem Engineering

• In Event: Postphenomenology - I: Smart Technologies

Abstract

Ecological approaches to cognition highlight the view that the specificity of the environment is of great relevance for understanding human agency. As technologies increasingly become the human environment itself, the insights of such an approach to agency reveal new considerations worth exploring in combination with a philosophy of technology such as postphenomenology.
Embedded sensors, artificial intelligence, and ubiquitous internet power in everyday environments constitute a radical step within the trajectory of human niche construction or ecosystem engineering. As smart environments promise a hyper-personalised, context-aware, anticipatory, and always-on kind of environment, they open up a new quality of human-technology interactions that pose a lot of questions regarding the scope and reach of their influence on human behaviour, practical skills, and cognitive abilities.
This paper aims to bridge the gap between the ecological approach to cognition and postphenomenology in order to (i) make the case for the importance of the technological environment as an enabler of human agency, and (ii) provide a basis for understanding some of the ethical challenges that smart environments will increasingly pose.

Author

• Margoth González Woge, Department of Philosophy, University of Twente