Are we being manipulated online? If so, is being manipulated by online technologies and algorithmic systems notably different from human forms of manipulation? And what is under threat exactly when people are manipulated online? This volume provides philosophical and conceptual depth to debates in digital ethics about online manipulation. The contributions explore the ramifications of our increasingly consequential interactions with online technologies such as online recommender systems, social media, user-friendly design, micro-targeting, default-settings, gamification, and real-time profiling. The authors in this (...) volume address four broad and interconnected themes: • What is the conceptual nature of online manipulation? And how, methodologically, should the concept be defined? • Does online manipulation threaten autonomy, freedom, and meaning in life, and if so, how? • What are the epistemic, affective, and political harms and risks associated with online manipulation? • What are legal and regulatory perspectives on online manipulation? The Philosophy of Online Manipulation brings these various considerations together to offer philosophically robust answers to critical questions concerning our online interactions with one another and with autonomous systems. It will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working in moral philosophy, digital ethics, philosophy of technology, and the ethics of manipulation. (shrink)

Love is often seen as the most intimate aspect of our lives, but it is increasingly engineered by a few programmers with Artificial Intelligence (AI). Nowadays, numerous dating platforms are deploying so-called smart algorithms to identify a greater number of potential matches for a user. These AI-enabled matchmaking systems, driven by a rich trove of data, can not only predict what a user might prefer but also deeply shape how people choose their partners. This paper draws on Jürgen Habermas’s “colonization (...) of the lifeworld” thesis to critically explore the insidious influence of delegating romantic decision-making to an algorithm. The love lifeworld is colonized inasmuch as online dating algorithms encroach into our romantic relations to the extent that communicative action within romance is replaced by the technocratic rules of an algorithm. (shrink)

The rapid development of machine-learning algorithms, which underpin contemporary artificial intelligence systems, has created new opportunities for the automation of work processes and management functions. While algorithmic management has been observed primarily within the platform-mediated gig economy, its transformative reach and consequences are also spreading to more standard work settings. Exploring algorithmic management as a sociotechnical concept, which reflects both technological infrastructures and organizational choices, we discuss how algorithmic management may influence existing power and social structures within organizations. We identify (...) three key issues. First, we explore how algorithmic management shapes pre-existing power dynamics between workers and managers. Second, we discuss how algorithmic management demands new roles and competencies while also fostering oppositional attitudes toward algorithms. Third, we explain how algorithmic management impacts knowledge and information exchange within an organization, unpacking the concept of opacity on both a technical and organizational level. We conclude by situating this piece in broader discussions on the future of work, accountability, and identifying future research steps. (shrink)

This short paper offers a series of responses to Jochem Zwier and Timothy Barker’s comments on my extended paper ‘Taking Exception: Philosophy of Technology as a Multidimensional Problem Space.’ Part one responds to questions concerning the modality of the renewed understanding of the theme of the transcendental that was argued for in my initial paper: I argue for the deep _contingency_ of such a move, against any sense that it is _necessary._ Part two takes this consideration of modality further, considering (...) the _possibilities_ that a renewal of the theme of the transcendental stands to offer philosophy of technology today. I argue that the contingency of our contemporary sense of the transcendental can be precisely what makes it valuable. Whereas parts one and two turn on incisive questions posed by Zwier, part three closes by reconsidering the claims for a ‘multidimensional problem space’ offered in my initial paper. In response to an acute insight from Barker, I close by arguing that philosophy of technology’s problem space should be explored in terms of a notion of ‘shared agonism’. (shrink)

Mobile health applications that promise the user to help her with some aspect of her health are very popular: for-profit apps such as MyFitnessPal, Fitbit, or Headspace have tens of millions of users each. For-profit health apps are designed and run as optimization systems. One would expect that these health apps aim to optimize the health of the user, but in reality they aim to optimize user engagement and, in effect, conversion. This is problematic, I argue, because digital health environments (...) that aim to optimize user engagement risk being manipulative. To develop this argument, I first provide a brief analysis of the underlying business models and the resulting designs of the digital environments provided by popular for-profit health apps. In a second step, I present a concept of manipulation that can help analyze digital environments such as health apps. In the last part of the article, I use my concept of manipulation to analyze the manipulative potential of for-profit health apps. Although for-profit health can certainly empower their users, the conditions for empowerment also largely overlap with the conditions for manipulation. As a result, we should be cautious when embracing the empowerment discourse surrounding health apps. An additional aim of this article is to contribute to the rapidly growing literature on digital choice architectures and the ethics of influencing behavior through such choice architectures. I take health apps to be a paradigmatic example of digital choice architectures that give rise to ethical questions, so my analysis of the manipulative potential of health apps can also inform the larger literature on digital choice architectures. (shrink)

Many optimistic responses have been proposed to bridge the threat of responsibility gaps which artificial systems create. This paper identifies a question which arises if this optimistic project proves successful. On a response-dependent understanding of responsibility, our responsibility practices themselves at least partially determine who counts as a responsible agent. On this basis, if AI or robot technology advance such that AI or robot agents become fitting participants within responsibility exchanges, then responsibility itself might be engineered. If we have good (...) reason to think such technological advances are likely, then we should take steps to address the potential for engineering responsibility. (shrink)

In this article, we argue that Ted Chiang’s short stories offer a realist philosophy of technology, one that charts a third course between the techno-pessimism and techno-optimism that characterize the history of philosophizing about technology and much of the speculative fiction about it. We begin by surveying the history of utopian and skeptical approaches to technology in philosophy and speculative fiction. We then move to discuss two of Chiang’s recent stories and use them to articulate the author’s techno-realism. Chiang’s view, (...) as it is developed in these stories, has three features: First, technology is not merely an agent of de-skilling, it can also promote self-knowledge and insight. Second, technology is not only an agent of alienation it can also provide succor and psychological relief. Finally, technology does not necessarily remake us into new beings with new capacities and needs. In many cases, it just gives us further avenues to be what we already were - to act on the tendencies and pursue the needs we always had. (shrink)

This article investigates how human life is conceptualized in the design and use of digital assistants and how this conceptualization feeds back into the life really lived. It suggests that a specific way of conceptualizing human life — namely as a set of tasks to be optimized — is responsible for the much-criticized information hunger of these digital assistants. The data collection of digital assistants raises not just several issues of privacy, but also the potential for improving people’s degree of (...) self-determination, because the optimization model of daily activity is genuinely suited to a certain mode of self-determination, namely the explicit and reflective setting, pursuing, and monitoring of goals. Furthermore, optimization systems’ need for generation and analysis of data overcomes one of the core weaknesses in human capacities for self-determination, namely problems with objective and quantitative self-assessment. It will be argued that critiques according to which digital assistants threaten to reduce their users’ autonomy tend to ignore that the risks to autonomy are derivative to potential gains in autonomy. These critiques are based on an overemphasis of a success conception of autonomy. Counter to this conception, being autonomous does not require a choice environment that exclusively supports a person’s “true” preferences, but the opportunity to engage with external influences, supportive as well as adverse. In conclusion, it will be argued that ethical evaluations of digital assistants should consider potential gains as well as potential risks for autonomy caused by the use of digital assistants. (shrink)

We begin by introducing our readers to the Extended Mind Thesis and briefly discuss a series of arguments in its favour. We continue by showing of such a theory can be resisted and go on to demonstrate that a more conservative account of cognition can be developed. We acknowledge a stalemate between these two different accounts of cognition and notice a couple of issues that we argue have prevented further progress in the field. To overcome the stalemate, we propose to (...) focus on the ethical implications of these theories. We link work conducted on the Extended Mind Thesis with contemporary transhumanist research and claim that extended may be ethically preferred over embedded because it is a more progressive and inclusive theory. (shrink)

Unlike the first generation of critical theorists, contemporary critical theory has largely ignored technology. This is to the detriment of a critical theory of society – technology is now a central feature of our daily lives and integral to the contemporary form of capitalism. Rather than seek to rescue the first generation’s substantive theory of technology, which has been partly outmoded by historical developments, the approach adopted in this article is to engage with today’s technology through the conceptual apparatus offered (...) by the early Frankfurt School. This rationale is guided by the conviction that the core ideas of critical theory still offer a sound basis for assessing the nature of technology today. Through a reconstruction and engagement with some of the core concepts of first-generation critical theory, as well as the work of Bernard Stiegler and Andrew Feenberg, we can arrive at a more robust theory of technology, capable of critically interrogating the role of technology in contemporary society. (shrink)

Personal AI assistants are now nearly ubiquitous. Every leading smartphone operating system comes with a personal AI assistant that promises to help you with basic cognitive tasks: searching, planning, messaging, scheduling and so on. Usage of such devices is effectively a form of algorithmic outsourcing: getting a smart algorithm to do something on your behalf. Many have expressed concerns about this algorithmic outsourcing. They claim that it is dehumanising, leads to cognitive degeneration, and robs us of our freedom and autonomy. (...) Some people have a more subtle view, arguing that it is problematic in those cases where its use may degrade important interpersonal virtues. In this article, I assess these objections to the use of AI assistants. I will argue that the ethics of their use is complex. There are no quick fixes or knockdown objections to the practice, but there are some legitimate concerns. By carefully analysing and evaluating the objections that have been lodged to date, we can begin to articulate an ethics of personal AI use that navigates those concerns. In the process, we can locate some paradoxes in our thinking about outsourcing and technological dependence, and we can think more clearly about what it means to live a good life in the age of smart machines. (shrink)

Technology has become one of the main channels through which people engage in most of their everyday activities. When working, learning, or socializing, the affordances created by technological tools determine the way in which users interact with one another and their environment, thus favoring certain actions and behaviors, while discouraging others. The ethical dimension behind the use of technology has been already studied in recent works, but the question is often formulated in a protective way that focuses on shielding the (...) users from potential detrimental effects. Nevertheless, when considering collateral ethical benefits that the use of technology could bring about, virtue ethics and the notions of “practice” and “practical wisdom” present new opportunities to harness this potential. By understanding the combination of technology, its users and their interactions as a system, technology can be seen as the space where most of its users’ daily practice happens. Through this practice, users can get the chance to collaterally develop and enhance their ethical awareness, sensitivity and reasoning capabilities. This work is shaped as a manifesto that provides the background, motivations and directions needed to ask a complementary question about the ethics of technology that aims towards the potentiality behind the use of technology. Instead of focusing on shielding the users, the proposed _ethical idealist_ approach to the ethics of technology aims to empower them by understanding their use of technology as the space where the development of their practical wisdom, understood in the virtue ethics’ sense, takes place. (shrink)

Multistability—the plurality of meanings of technological artifacts—is an emancipatory phenomenon insofar as it allows the user to freely appropriate the object according to his or her interests, even against the will of the designer. The objective of this article is to show how the trend to connect physical and digital artifacts to the Internet poses a danger to the freedom that there is in multistability. By reducing the traditional separation between the artifact and the designer, the connection of the artifact (...) to the Internet allows the designer to continually modify the software that governs or constitutes it, which involves a relative loss of power for the user to determine its meaning. This change, in favor of the designer in the correlation of power among the actors—designer, artifact, and user—from whose interplay the meaning of artifacts arises, favors concentric stabilities and hinders eccentric ones with respect to the will of the designer. Thus, we should rethink the truth value of the designer fallacy, that is, the claim that the meaning of artifacts is determined only by the designer. From a political point of view, the remote control of artifacts and their multistability is an effective pedagogical tool to educate human beings in a time in which texts, according to Sloterdijk, no longer serve this function. (shrink)

From the perspective of Martin Heidegger’s philosophy of technology, the Internet qualifies as a paradigm of modern technology, for it possesses all its essential properties to a very high degree: the setting-upon, the challenging revealing, the revealing of what-is as standing-reserve, and a multiple concealment. This article is dedicated to proving the truth of this statement through an analysis of the way in which the Internet satisfies in an exemplary way these properties of the essence of modern technology. Among the (...) possible corollaries of this analysis, we will focus on showing how it constitutes an argument against mythinformation philosophies such as Sloterdijk’s, as we show that the Internet is not governed by an alleged non-dominant, dialogical, and cooperative operativity. (shrink)

One of the great dangers of our time is that the cumulative long-term action of smart socio-technical environments engineered to control thought and behavior results in an excessive loss of freedom. In response to this challenge, that we shall call humanity’s socio-technical dilemma, we outline here some fundamental ideas of a political program to control these environments, which is similar to the one proposed by Brett Frischmann and Evan Selinger. It is similar insofar as we share their paternalistic and humanistic (...) approach. But it is different insofar as we claim, first, the duty to admit that it is a version of Sloterdijk’s controversial human zoo; second, the theoretical and practical convenience of identifying the human capabilities to be promoted by these environments with the capabilities necessary for the democratic electorate to comply with the competence principle; and third, the awareness of the probable long-term unsustainability of the program in a context of competition between countries and companies, in spite of which it must be implemented because of its moral superiority. (shrink)

Digital hyperconnectivity is a defining fact of our time. In addition to recasting social interaction, culture, economics, and politics, it has profoundly transformed the self. It has created new ways of being and constructing a self, but also new ways of being constructed as a self from the outside, new ways of being configured, represented, and governed as a self by sociotechnical systems. Rather than analyze theories of the self, I focus on practices of the self, using this expression in (...) a looser, more general sense than that used by Foucault. I begin by considering and reformulating two early lines of argument about the web as a medium for exploring and emancipating the self. Subsequent sections show how digital hyperconnectivity has engendered new ways of objectifying, quantifying, producing, and regulating the self—considered both as active, reflexive practices and as systemic, data- and algorithm-driven processes. I conclude by reflecting on the broader implications of contemporary modes of governing the self and by underscoring the ways in which hyperconnectivity has colonized the territories of the self, conscripting the self into the service of techno-social systems. (shrink)

This paper critically investigates the ethical perspectives and practices of individuals and organizations who make persuasive technologies. An organization that claims to be at the forefront of ethical persuasion is behavioral software company Boundless Mind. Yet Boundless Mind sells ostensibly oxymoronic software products: an Application Programming Interface for third-party applications that optimizes the capture of end user attention, and an application for end users on how to make third-party applications less persuasive. Drawing upon Foucault’s interpretation of ethics as an “aesthetics (...) of existence” and the related concept of “therapeutic authority,” I argue Boundless Mind justify the “poaching” and “protecting” of user attention based on a view of the human subject as fixable and their capability to instrumentalize user subjectivity to socially desirable ends. I walkthrough Boundless Mind’s technology-habit-breaking application Space and highlight a behavioral technique administered by Space called stimulus devaluation, which enables the user to develop a transformative relationship with their technology habits and persuasive applications. I conclude the paper by arguing that a persuasive technology ethics based on fixing the user obfuscates the power of persuasive technologists by limiting the scope of ethical inquiry to the activities of the user. (shrink)

Günther Anders offers one of the first phenomenological analyses of broadcast radio and its transformation of the contemporary experience of music. Anders also develops a reflection on its political consequences as he continues his reflection in a discussion of radio and newsreel, film and television in his 1956 ‘The World as Phantom and Matrix’. A reflection on the consequences of this transformation brings in Friedrich Kittler’s reflection on radio and precision bombing. A further reflection on Jean Baudrillard’s notion of ‘speech (...) without response’ permits a review of digital culture and the self-creation of the digital consumer absorbed in what Anders named a schizo-topia, that is, today, an autistic culture of distraction, displacement, and self-driven surveillance. (shrink)

Behavioral intervention techniques leveraging reactive responses have gained popularity as tools for promoting ethical behavior. Choice architects, for example, design and present default opt-out options to nudge individuals into accepting preselected choices deemed beneficial to both the decision-maker and society. Such interventions can also employ mild financial incentives or affective triggers including joy, fear, empathy, social pressure, and reputational rewards. We argue, however, that ethical competence is achieved via reflection, and that heavy reliance on reactive behavioral interventions can undermine the (...) development of ethical competence over the long term. Specifically, drawbacks may occur through motivational displacement, dependency, moral crowding out, loss of personal autonomy, and reactance. We introduce complementary cognitive boosting techniques designed to stimulate reflective cognition, as a more promising long-term strategy for instilling ethical behavior. One such approach is the Moral Self-Awareness (MSA) motivational construct, which incrementally leads agents to increasing levels of ethical reflection. We explain why ethical boosting approaches present more edifying and durable alternatives to reactive behavioral interventions and offer suggestions for social and organizational policy. (shrink)

Rapid advances in AI-based automation have led to a number of existential and economic concerns. In particular, as automating technologies develop enhanced competency they seem to threaten the values associated with meaningful work. In this article, we focus on one such value: the value of achievement. We argue that achievement is a key part of what makes work meaningful and that advances in AI and automation give rise to a number achievement gaps in the workplace. This could limit people’s ability (...) to participate in meaningful forms of work. Achievement gaps are interesting, in part, because they are the inverse of the (negative) responsibility gaps already widely discussed in the literature on AI ethics. Having described and explained the problem of achievement gaps, the article concludes by identifying four possible policy responses to the problem. (shrink)

Ever-increasing numbers of human interactions with intelligent software agents, online and offline, and their increasing ability to influence humans have prompted a surge in attention toward the concept of (online) manipulation. Several scholars have argued that manipulative influence is always hidden. But manipulation is sometimes overt, and when this is acknowledged the distinction between manipulation and other forms of social influence becomes problematic. Therefore, we need a better conceptualisation of manipulation that allows it to be overt and yet clearly distinct (...) from related concepts of social influence. I argue that manipulation is careless influence, show how this account helps to alleviate the shortcomings of the hidden influence view of manipulation, and derive implications for digital ethics. (shrink)

It is commonly assumed that a virtual life would be less meaningful (perhaps even meaningless). As virtual reality technologies develop and become more integrated into our everyday lives, this poses a challenge for those that care about meaning in life. In this chapter, it is argued that the common assumption about meaninglessness and virtuality is mistaken. After clarifying the distinction between two different visions of virtual reality, four arguments are presented for thinking that meaning is possible in virtual reality. Following (...) this, four objections are discussed and rebutted. The chapter concludes that we can be cautiously optimistic about the possibility of meaning in virtual worlds. (shrink)