Postphenomenology - I: Smart Technologies

Abstract

As our phones become smartphones, our homes become smarthomes, our clothing becomes laced with wearable computing, and our cities become smartcities, questions are raised about how these changes not only supply new conveniences, but also how they may be fundamentally altering our environment. We can ask what new abilities are gained, and what old problems are solved, by these technologies. But we must also address new questions about the nature of privacy in the digital age, the intentionality of AI, the capacity for pervasive computing to shape our choices, and the potential for biases to become built into our surroundings and encoded within our algorithms. The postphenomenological perspective has tools for grappling with at least some of the central aspects of these issues.
In this panel, Margoth González Woge investigates the way human cognition becomes reshaped within smart environments, and she considers the implications of these reshapings for questions of human agency. Esther Keymolen explores the trust relations that mediate our experience of privacy in a world of smart computing. Robert Rosenberger considers the forms of discrimination that can become embedded in the built environment in both its high tech and low tech forms, from anti-loitering spikes, to bias effects in facial recognition technologies. Galit Wellner’s presentation delves deeper into artificial intelligence, and sets out to conceive of the kind of technological mediation that occurs in our relation to algorithms. And Nicola Liberati considers the technological mediation that occurs when computing systems travel with us in the form smart textiles.

Chair

• Don Ihde, Stony Brook University

Individual Presentations

• Smart Environments: Exploring the Implications of the Next Step in Ecosystem Engineering - Margoth González Woge, Department of Philosophy, University of Twente

• Technologies of Discrimination - Robert Rosenberger, Georgia Institute of Technology

• I-Algorithm-Dataset: Locating the Bias in AI Technologies - Galit Wellner, The NB School of Design & Tel Aviv University

• The Future of Fashion Among Smart Textile, Postphenomenology, and Mediation Theory - Nicola Liberati, Department of Philosophy, University of Twente

Session Organizer

• Robert Rosenberger, Georgia Institute of Technology