Moral Hermeneutics and Technology: Making Moral Sense through Human-Technology-World Relations

In Moral Hermeneutics and Technology: Making Moral Sense through Human-Technology-World Relations, Olya Kudina explores the role of technology in the way people arrive at their moral intuitions and choices and revise their moral commitments, a phenomenon she calls “moral hermeneutics.” This book considers technology as a mediator of human...

Theorizing and criticizing human-technology relations: Interdisciplinary perspectives, emerging technologies, and open science

Towards inclusive automatic speech recognition

Practice and recent evidence show that state-of-the-art (SotA) automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems do not perform equally well for all speaker groups. Many factors can cause this bias against different speaker groups. This paper, for the first time, systematically quantifies and finds speech recognition bias against gender, age, regional...

Understanding Technology-Induced Value Change: a Pragmatist Proposal

We propose a pragmatist account of value change that helps to understand how and why values sometimes change due to technological developments. Inspired by John Dewey’s writings on value, we propose to understand values as evaluative devices that carry over from earlier experiences and that are to some extent shared in society. We discuss the...

Moral Uncertainty in Technomoral Change: Bridging the Explanatory Gap

This paper explores the role of moral uncertainty in explaining the morally disruptive character of new technologies. We argue that existing accounts of technomoral change do not fully explain its disruptiveness. This explanatory gap can be bridged by examining the epistemic dimensions of technomoral change, focusing on moral uncertainty and...

What is morally at stake when using algorithms to make medical diagnoses? Expanding the discussion beyond risks and harms

In this paper, we examine the qualitative moral impact of machine learning-based clinical decision support systems in the process of medical diagnosis. To date, discussions about machine learning in this context have focused on problems that can be measured and assessed quantitatively, such as by estimating the extent of potential harm or...

Speak, memory: the postphenomenological analysis of memory-making in the age of algorithmically powered social networks

This paper explores the productive role that social network platforms such as Facebook, play in the practice of memory-making. While such platforms facilitate interaction across distance and time, they also solidify human self-expression and memory-making by systematically confronting the users with their digital past. By relying on the...

Bridging values: Finding a balance between privacy and control. The case of Corona apps in Belgium and the Netherlands

This paper focuses on two examples of the introduction and use of COVID-19 contact tracing apps in The Netherlands (CoronaMelder) and Belgium (Coronalert). It aims to offer a critical, sociotechnical perspective on tracing apps to understand how social, technical, and institutional dimensions form the ingredients for increasing surveillance....

Co-designing diagnosis: Towards a responsible integration of Machine Learning decision-support systems in medical diagnostics

Rationale: This paper aims to show how the focus on eradicating bias from Machine Learning decision-support systems in medical diagnosis diverts attention from the hermeneutic nature of medical decision-making and the productive role of bias. We want to show how an introduction of Machine Learning systems alters the diagnostic process....

“Alexa, define empowerment”: voice assistants at home, appropriation and technoperformances

Purpose: This paper aims to show how the production of meaning is a matter of people interacting with technologies, throughout their appropriation and in co-performances. The researchers rely on the case of household-based voice assistants that endorse speaking as a primary mode of interaction with technologies. By analyzing the ethical...

“Alexa, who am I?”: Voice Assistants and Hermeneutic Lemniscate as the Technologically Mediated Sense-Making

In this paper, I argue that AI-powered voice assistants, just as all technologies, actively mediate our interpretative structures, including values. I show this by explaining the productive role of technologies in the way people make sense of themselves and those around them. More specifically, I rely on the hermeneutics of Gadamer and the...

Values in responsible research and innovation: from entities to practices

This article explores the understanding of values in Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI). First, it analyses how two mainstream RRI approaches, the largely substantial one by Von Schomberg and the procedural one by Stilgoe and colleagues, identify and conceptualize values. We argue that by treating values as relatively stable entities,...