This chapter discusses cryptocurrency, distributed ledger technology and blockchain tokens within the context of technological innovation, the history of money and accounting practices, and their multiple functionalities beyond those of standard currencies. This discussion is motivated by the design of cryptocurrencies for specific community needs, and to reflect anti-rival, positive sum value.

This chapter discusses cryptocurrency, distributed ledger technology and blockchain tokens within the context of technological innovation, the history of money and accounting practices, and their multiple functionalities beyond those of standard currencies. This discussion is motivated by the design of cryptocurrencies for specific community needs, and to reflect anti-rival, positive sum value.

BackgroundIncreasingly, hospitals and research institutes are developing technical solutions for sharing patient data in a privacy preserving manner. Two of these technical solutions are homomorphic encryption and distributed ledger technology. Homomorphic encryption allows computations to be performed on data without this data ever being decrypted. Therefore, homomorphic encryption represents a potential solution for conducting feasibility studies on cohorts of sensitive patient data stored in distributed locations. Distributed ledger technology provides a permanent record on (...) all transfers and processing of patient data, allowing data custodians to audit access. A significant portion of the current literature has examined how these technologies might comply with data protection and research ethics frameworks. In the Swiss context, these instruments include the Federal Act on Data Protection and the Human Research Act. There are also institutional frameworks that govern the processing of health related and genetic data at different universities and hospitals. Given Switzerland’s geographical proximity to European Union (EU) member states, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) may impose additional obligations.MethodsTo conduct this assessment, we carried out a series of qualitative interviews with key stakeholders at Swiss hospitals and research institutions. These included legal and clinical data management staff, as well as clinical and research ethics experts. These interviews were carried out with two series of vignettes that focused on data discovery using homomorphic encryption and data erasure from a distributed ledger platform.ResultsFor our first set of vignettes, interviewees were prepared to allow data discovery requests if patients had provided general consent or ethics committee approval, depending on the types of data made available. Our interviewees highlighted the importance of protecting against the risk of reidentification given different types of data. For our second set, there was disagreement amongst interviewees on whether they would delete patient data locally, or delete data linked to a ledger with cryptographic hashes. Our interviewees were also willing to delete data locally or on the ledger, subject to local legislation.ConclusionOur findings can help guide the deployment of these technologies, as well as determine ethics and legal requirements for such technologies. (shrink)

This paper investigates ontological dimensions of the blockchain by asking what kind of socio-technical object bitcoin is. It discusses both blockchain's political qualities and the political forms enabled by its emergence. It first observes recent approaches to the ontology of money and the political qualities of the ledgers used by the current fractional reserve banking model. It then directs the same questions at blockchain technology. The paper discusses an ontology proposed by Ole Bjerg and argues in favour of a (...) mixed-ontology approach to blockchains. It then questions the political qualities of the distributed ledger as a digital object and highlights the apparent absence of authority figures in the model. Finally, it argues that the political ontology of the blockchain can be framed as the displacement of authority from institutional actors into instrumental control of trust, in a dynamically distributed environment. (shrink)

A blockchain can be considered a technological phenomenon that is made up of different interconnected and autonomous systems. Such systems are referred to here as cyber-physical systems: complex interconnections of cyber and physical components. When cyber-physical systems are interconnected, a new whole consisting of a system of systems is created by the autonomous systems and their intercommunication and interaction. In a blockchain, individual systems can independently make decisions on joint information transactions. The decision-making procedures needed for this are executed based (...) on fault-tolerant communication and voting and consensus procedures, while the results of these decision-making procedures are stored in distributed ledgers. Due to the intercommunication, interaction, and independent decision making by autonomous systems, the new whole of a blockchain is a complex entity. Complexity science rather than the usual reductionist scientific approach can help us better understand the behaviour of the new and continuously developing whole of a blockchain as a technological phenomenon. (shrink)

This paper provides an analysis of how concepts pertinent to legal contracts can influence certain aspects of their digital implementation through smart contracts, as inspired by recent developments in distributed ledger technology. We discuss how properties of imperative and declarative languages including the underlying architectures to support contract management and lifecycle apply to various aspects of legal contracts. We then address these properties in the context of several blockchain architectures. While imperative languages are commonly used to implement (...) smart contracts, we find that declarative languages provide more natural ways to deal with certain aspects of legal contracts and their automated management. (shrink)

Aura & Transvestment is a transmedia project consisting of a series of generative images, an experimental form of cryptomedia and a video essay. By describing its own powers and contradictions, the work explores notions of value, ownership, authenticity, artificial scarcity and abundance in the digital realm. The project is a critical analysis of non-fungible tokens used as proof of ownership for digital art, taking Walter Benjamin’s concept of aura as a starting point. It argues that, for tokenized art, cryptography serves (...) as an artificial source of auratic power that reverts the political potential of reproducibility falling back to a magical and ritual notion of aura. This time around the ritual performed is that of property, authenticity, ownership, markets and commodification. Finally, the article outlines alternative uses of cryptography and distributed ledger technologies to support artistic labour and proposes transvestment as a temporary counter-action for the reallocation of value from capitalist forms of production and into commons-based models of social coordination. Submitted to this journal is an adaptation of the script for the video essay, alongside other elements of the project. Please visit: https://aura-transvestment.art/. (shrink)

This textbook on sustainable consumption develops a means to mitigate the environmental tragedy of the commons associated with climate change. We diagnosed that two problems to be solved are (1)the negligible impact each individual makes on the global atmospheric commons, and (2) the worry that others will not do their part in making sustainable choices. As well, individuals may not have perfect information about the impact of their consumptive choices. Topics in this book include consumer sovereignty; data and perfect information; (...) tragedy of the commons; positive and negative externalities; negligibility and anti-rival goods; distributed ledger technology and cryptocurrencies; and polycentric governance. (shrink)

The paper focuses on the philosophical challenges of governance over trustless ledgers, namely Bitcoin Layer 2 solutions in El Salvador. Blockchain adoption in El Salvador is an example of policy based on a ‘frontier epistemology’ (Nickles 2009 ), creating a situation where “facts are uncertain, values are in dispute, stakes are high, and decisions are urgent” (Funtowicz and Ravetz 1993 ). Trustless ledgers play a role of such ‘frontiers’ of knowledge and governance that support a variety of technocratic, heuristic, and (...) experimental policy approaches. They challenge the traditional knowledge frameworks and governance processes responsible for attempts to embed (align) predetermined ideologies (values and stakes) into the technology over standards. Instead, as amalgams of social, political, legal, and economic interventions, ledgers function simultaneously as a contract, a monetary system, a political value commitment, and a governance structure. By integrating facts, values, and stakes into algorithms, they define the frontiers of epistemology and governance in two opposing ways. On the one hand, trustless ledgers embody Augustine’s Civitas Dei (the City of God) as a new design (novum consilium) that promises a future world (futurum saeculum) (Augustine 1968 ). With a promise of a system, where everyone is ‘free’ to not being able to ‘sin’ (non posse peccare - delet the res non peccare), social agency is reduced to a code of a trustless infrastructure. On the other hand, ledgers support experimental (Sabel and Zeitlin 2012 ) and heuristic policymaking (Nickles 2009 ) that saves social agency and cuts ‘through traditional discovery/justification and descriptive/ normative distinctions’ (Nickles 2009 ). The distributed ledgers as governance experiments then redefine Civitas Terrena’s governance as a challenge of ‘heuristic appraisal’ (Nickles 2009 ), ‘directly deliberative polyarchy’ (Cohen and Sabel 1997 ), and ‘experimentalist governance’ (Sabel and Zeitlin 2012 ). To elaborate on the blockchain governance experiments, we will use two Bitcoin initiatives in El Salvador (Bitcoin City and Bitcoin Beach) and discuss them in the context of a broader adoption of blockchain in South America. (shrink)

This article studies the origin and continuity of the identity of the entities inscribed in a distributed ledger. Specifically, it focuses on the differences between the identities of the entities that exist in a distributed ledger and those of the entities that exist outside the ledger but must be represented in the ledger in order to interact with it. It suggests that a distributed ledger that contains representations of entities that exist outside (...) the ledger can yield a continuum of interconnected existing and past identities that is constantly redefined to represent new conceptual entities. This continuum can be understood as a metasortal—or a sortal of sortals—that resembles the mathematical structure of a set of sets. Further, the article presents the dilemma that arises when representing the identities of entities in a distributed ledger, and it draws an analogy between this dilemma and Russell's Paradox. (shrink)

We welcome Ms Smajdor’s critique into our investigations of expected future tax gains to the state from children conceived by in vitro fertilisation .1 To better inform the JME readership, we wish to correct some misinterpretations of our research by Smajdor, and to highlight some weaknesses of current IVF funding policies.Our investigation sought to establish the long-term net tax contribution from an IVF-conceived child, assuming that the child was average in every respect .2 We conducted this analysis on the basis (...) that IVF, and other assisted reproductive treatments, are unique among all medical interventions—unique in the sense that their success leads to the creation of human life; a life that would not have existed had the technology not been available and accessible to couples willing to undergo treatment. Hence, this method provides us with an opportunity to explore lost tax revenue to the state resulting from children that have not been born due to limited public access to IVF treatments currently observed in the UK and many other countries.In our investigations, the costs of IVF were treated as an investment in human capital with future long-term cost and revenue implications for the state. Our evaluation ignored the many humanistic reasons for offering IVF treatment to infertile couples and concentrated solely on the possible economic benefits.3 The perspective of the analysis was that of the state; hence …. (shrink)

An influential approach to engineering ethics is based on codes of ethics and the application of moral principles by individual practitioners. However, to better understand the ethical problems of complex technological systems and the moral reasoning involved in such contexts, we need other tools as well. In this article, we consider the role of imagination and develop a concept of distributed responsibility in order to capture a broader range of human abilities and dimensions of moral responsibility. We show that (...) in the case of Snorre A, a near-disaster with an oil and gas production installation, imagination played a crucial and morally relevant role in how the crew coped with the crisis. For example, we discuss the role of scenarios and images in the moral reasoning and discussion of the platform crew in coping with the crisis. Moreover, we argue that responsibility for increased system vulnerability, turning an undesired event into a near-disaster, should not be ascribed exclusively, for example to individual engineers alone, but should be understood as distributed between various actors, levels and times. We conclude that both managers and engineers need imagination to transcend their disciplinary perspectives in order to improve the robustness of their organisations and to be better prepared for crisis situations. We recommend that education and training programmes should be transformed accordingly. (shrink)

Technology moves us to a better world. We contend that through technology people can simplify and solve moral tasks when they are in presence of incomplete information and possess a diminished capacity to act morally. Many external things, usually inert from the moral point of view, can be transformed into the so-called moral mediators. Hence, not all of the moral tools are inside the head, many of them are shared and distributed in “external” objects and structures which (...) function as ethical devices. (shrink)

There are certain kinds of risk for which governments, rather than individual actors, are increasingly held responsible. This article discusses how regulatory institutions can ensure an equitable distribution of risk between various groups such as rich and poor, and present and future generations. It focuses on cases of risk associated with technological and biotechnological innovation. After discussing various possibilities and difficulties of distribution, this article proposes a non-welfarist understanding of risk as a burden of cooperation.

The power trading system has the characteristics of nonlinearity, dynamics, and complexity. Part of the business data in the trading system needs to be exposed to numerous external business systems. The traditional centralized power trading model has some problems, such as low data security and trust crisis of regulators. Blockchain technology provides prominent ideas for solving these problems. Firstly, the improved AdaBoost algorithm is used to predict the supply and demand gap of power trading nodes. Secondly, based on the (...) fact that the information on the blockchain is only open to the power supply side, a two-stage game model of asymmetric information between the power supply side and the power user is constructed to capture the price competition behavior between them in order to find the Nash equilibrium price in two stages. Finally, the US PJM market electricity market data are used to carry out an example analysis to verify the effectiveness of the algorithm and model. (shrink)

In 1968, Jürgen Habermas claimed that, in an advanced technological society, the emancipatory force of knowledge can only be regained by actively recovering the ‘forgotten experience of reflection’. In this article, we argue that, in the contemporary situation, critical reflection requires a deliberative ambiance, a process of mutual learning, a consciously organised process of deliberative and distributed reflection. And this especially applies, we argue, to critical reflection concerning a specific subset of technologies which are actually oriented towards optimising human (...) cognition. In order to create a deliberative ambiance, fostering critical upstream reflection on emerging technologies, we developed the concept of a mutual learning exercise. Building on a number of case studies, we analyse what an MLE involves, both practically and conceptually, focussing on key aspects such as ambiance and expertise, the role of ‘genres of the imagination’ and the profiles of various ‘subcultures of debate’. Ideally, an MLE becomes a contemporary version of the Socratic agora, providing a stage where multiple and sometimes unexpected voices and perspectives mutually challenge each other, in order to strength-en the societal robustness and responsiveness of emerg-ing technologies. (shrink)

Nowadays, the development of human society and daily life are inseparable from the power supply. Therefore, people also put forward higher requirements for the reliability of distribution network, but power companies can only passively deal with distribution network failures, which is a bottleneck for the improvement of distribution network reliability. The Internet of Things is the best solution for online equipment status monitoring and basic data sharing for large, widely distributed, relatively fixed, and large numbers of equipment. The construction (...) of the IoT for power distribution equipment faces many important problems, including the selection of networking, equipment selection, and interaction standards. When researching the implementation plan, research on the distribution of IoT market was carried out. Based on the grid, the idea of optimizing the investment selection plan of the power distribution using IoT was discussed, and a result verification model was established. After the completion of the theoretical part, a case study of medium-voltage distribution grid equipment management and medium-voltage distribution network equipment management based on the grid was carried out by taking a real enterprise application situation as an example. Realizing fault diagnosis of distribution network will not only provide decision support for operation and maintenance of distribution network for power companies, but also have great economic and social benefits. Aiming at the shortcomings of single data mining method in distribution network fault diagnosis, hybrid data mining method is proposed. First, rough set theory is used to reduce the original fault data and form a simplified rule set. Because of the non-linearity of distribution network fault and the strong learning ability, adaptability, and robustness of Bayesian network, Bayesian network can be used to classify distribution network faults. Therefore, a simplified fault diagnosis system is established in this paper, and its correctness is confirmed. Then, the learning and training are carried out by using Bayesian network to call the simplest rule set, which has the characteristics of short learning and training time and high diagnostic accuracy. (shrink)

The phenomenon of distributed knowledge is well-known in epistemic logic. In this paper, a similar phenomenon in ethics, somewhat neglected so far, is investigated, namely distributed morality. The article explains the nature of distributed morality, as a feature of moral agency, and explores the implications of its occurrence in advanced information societies. In the course of the analysis, the concept of infraethics is introduced, in order to refer to the ensemble of moral enablers, which, although morally neutral (...) per se, can significantly facilitate or hinder both positive and negative moral behaviours. (shrink)

This article builds upon previous discussion of social and technical determinisms as implicit positions in the biofuel debate. To ensure these debates are balanced, it has been suggested that they should be designed to contain a variety of deterministic positions. Whilst it is agreed that determinism does not feature strongly in contemporary academic literatures, it is found that they have generally been superseded by an absence of any substantive conceptualisation of how the social shaping of technology may be related (...) to, or occur alongside, an objective or autonomous reality. The problem of determinism emerges at an ontological level and must be resolved in situ. A critical realist approach to technology is presented which may provide a more appropriate framework for debate. In dialogue with previous discussion, the distribution of responsibility is revisited with reference to the role of scientists and engineers. (shrink)

According to the hypotheses of distributed and extended cognition, remembering does not always occur entirely inside the brain but is often distributed across heterogeneous systems combining neural, bodily, social, and technological resources. These ideas have been intensely debated in philosophy, but the philosophical debate has often remained at some distance from relevant empirical research, while empirical memory research, in particular, has been somewhat slow to incorporate distributed/extended ideas. This situation, however, appears to be changing, as we witness (...) an increasing level of interaction between the philosophy and the empirical research. In this editorial, we provide a high-level historical overview of the development of the debates around the hypotheses of distributed and extended cognition, as well as relevant theory and empirical research on memory, considering both the role of memory in theoretical debates around distributed/extended ideas and strands of memory research that resonate with those ideas; we emphasize recent trends towards increased interaction, including new empirical paradigms for investigating distributed memory systems. We then provide an overview of the special issue itself, drawing out a number of general implications from the contributions, and conclude by sketching promising directions for future research on distributed memory. (shrink)

Reinvigorates our understanding of Victorian and modernist works and society Offers a wide-ranging application of theories of distributed cognition to Victorian culture and Modernism Explores the distinctive nature and expression of notions of distributed cognition in Victorian culture and Modernism and considers their relation to current notions Reinvigorates our understanding of Western European works – including Wordsworth, T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf – and society by bringing to bear recent insights on the distributed nature of cognition (...) Includes essays by international specialists in Victorian culture and Modernist literature, history, technology, science, philosophy and art including Andrew Michael Roberts, Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei and Melba Cuddy-Keane Includes essays on literature, history, technology, science, philosophy and art This book brings together 11 essays by international specialists in Victorian culture and modernism and provides a general and period-specific introduction to distributed cognition and the cognitive humanities. Together, they revitalise our reading of Victorian and modernist works in the fields of history of technology, science and medicine, material culture, philosophy, art and literary studies by bringing to bear recent insights in cognitive science and philosophy of mind on the ways in which cognition is distributed across brain, body and world. (shrink)

There are various philosophical approaches and theories describing the intimate relation people have to artifacts. In this paper, I explore the relation between two such theories, namely distributed cognition and distributed morality theory. I point out a number of similarities and differences in these views regarding the ontological status they attribute to artifacts and the larger systems they are part of. Having evaluated and compared these views, I continue by focussing on the way cognitive artifacts are used in (...) moral practice. I specifically conceptualise how such artifacts (a) scaffold and extend moral reasoning and decision-making processes, (b) have a certain moral status which is contingent on their cognitive status, and (c) whether responsibility can be attributed to distributed systems. This paper is primarily written for those interested in the intersection of cognitive and moral theory as it relates to artifacts, but also for those independently interested in philosophical debates in extended and distributed cognition and ethics of (cognitive) technology. (shrink)

This paper explores the implications of extended and distributed cognition theory for our notions of personal identity. On an extended and distributed approach to cognition, external information is under certain conditions constitutive of memory. On a narrative approach to personal identity, autobiographical memory is constitutive of our diachronic self. In this paper, I bring these two approaches together and argue that external information can be constitutive of one’s autobiographical memory and thus also of one’s diachronic self. To develop (...) this claim, I draw on recent empirical work in human-computer interaction, looking at lifelogging technologies in both healthcare and everyday contexts. I argue that personal identity can neither be reduced to psychological structures instantiated by the brain nor by biological structures instantiated by the organism, but should be seen as an environmentally-distributed and relational construct. In other words, the complex web of cognitive relations we develop and maintain with other people and technological artifacts partly determines our self. This view has conceptual, methodological, and normative implications: we should broaden our concepts of the self as to include social and artifactual structures, focus on external memory systems in the (empirical) study of personal identity, and not interfere with people’s distributed minds and selves. (shrink)

Distributed cognition, as it considers how technologies augment cognition, informs technology integration in education. Most educational technologists interested in distributed cognition embrace a representational theory of mind. As this theory assumes cognition occurs in the brain and depends on the internal representation of external information, it is informed by a mind/body dualism that separates the individual student from material things. Alternatively, the theory of the extended mind describes the mind as a dynamic system of interactions inclusive of (...) human agents, technologies and other material things. Refusing the mind/body dualism, if one element is removed, the quality of cognitive activity declines. Across the cognitive sciences, there are debates between these representational and extended theories that have implications for what it means to be a student and for technology integration. However, distributed cognition research in educational technology ignores these debates. Instead, this research is conditioned by the discursive practices of a neoliberal assemblage of political, commercial and pedagogical institutions. In this era of high stakes testing, as the individual student is measured, evaluated and otherwise made subject through these practices, this assemblage expresses a tacit commitment to, and is productive of, the subjectivity of the individual student and thus benefits from the representational theory of mind. In this way, regardless of the recognized legitimacy of the theory of the extended mind, sustained by neoliberalism the field of educational technology will not soon question the veracity of the representational theory of mind or the mind/body dualism upon which it depends. (shrink)

Various arguments have been provided for drawing non-humans such as animals and artificial agents into the sphere of moral consideration. In this paper, I argue for a shift from an ontological to a social-philosophical approach: instead of asking what an entity is, we should try to conceptually grasp the quasi-social dimension of relations between non-humans and humans. This allows me to reconsider the problem of justice, in particular distributive justice . Engaging with the work of Rawls, I show that an (...) expansion of the contractarian framework to non-humans causes an important problem for liberalism, but can be justified by a contractarian argument. Responding to Bell’s and Nussbaum’s comments on Rawls, I argue that we can justify drawing non-humans into the sphere of distributive justice by relying on the notion of a co-operative scheme. I discuss what co-operation between humans and non-humans can mean and the extent to which it depends on properties. I conclude that we need to imagine principles of ecological and technological distributive justice. (shrink)

If distributed cognition is to become a general analytic frame, it needs to handle more aspects of cognition than just highly efficient problem solving. It should also handle learning. We identify four classes of distributed learning: induction, repurposing, symbiotic tuning, and mutual adaptation. The four classes of distributed learning fit into a two-dimensional space defined by the stability and adaptability of individuals and their environments. In all four classes of learning, people and their environments are highly interdependent (...) during initial learning. At the same time, we present evidence indicating that certain types of interdependence in early learning, most notably mutual adaptation, can help prepare people to be less dependent on their immediate environment and more adaptive when they confront new environments. We also describe and test examples of learning technologies that implement mutual adaptation. (shrink)

Sustainable technology is a microcosm that illuminates the relationship between technology and human agency. We tend to think about sustainability in terms of the properties of things. However, technology is not just things but techniques which have their own bearing on sustainability, for users may employ sustainable technologies in unsustainable ways. Clueless or stymied users may be managed through education or redesign; however, there are intractable users who cannot be managed through either approach. I trace the cause (...) of this intractability to interaction between the improvisational nature of human agency and the multiple realizability of artifact functions. I argue that managing intractable users requires going with the flow of their relationship to technology rather than trying to control it through education or redesign, and that democratizing the development and distribution of technology is the best way to do this. Finally, these results easily generalize to technologies not aimed at sustainability. (shrink)

Distributed cognition is widely recognized as an approach to the study of all cognition. It identifies the distribution of cognitive processes between persons and technology, among people, and across time in the development of the social and material contexts for thinking. This paper suggests an ectoderm-centric perspective as the basis for distributed cognition, and in so doing redefines distributed cognition as the ability of an organism to interact with its environment for the purpose of satisfying its (...) most basic physiological (internal and external) and social needs in order to survive and sustain itself. Underlying this ectoderm-centric perspective is a proposed theory of reactive and interactive learning. (shrink)

Blockchain technology applied to cryptocurrencies is the dominant factor in maintaining the security of cryptocurrencies. This article reviews the technological implementation of cryptocurrency and the security and stability of cryptocurrency and analyzes the security support from blockchain technology and its platforms based on empirical case studies. Our results show that the security support from blockchain technology platforms is significantly insufficient and immature. In addition, we further Zyskind and Nathan and Choi and find that the top ten platforms (...) play critical roles in security support and have significant advantages in terms of funds, duration, and human resources. Moreover, these platforms provide computational resources and benefits to the consensus algorithm selection for blockchain practitioners. Second, encryption ensures the security of cryptocurrencies. On the one hand, the digital signatures identify the identity of the signatory and the transaction. However, the principle of the hash algorithm confirms ownership. Meanwhile, SHA256 is infeasible to compute in the reverse direction and is difficult to attack. Furthermore, the records in the blockchain can be queried by every participant, making the system information transparent and open reliable. Third, compared to the study of Fu and Fang 2016, we find that the blockchain structure is composed of security components and basic components of six layers that are independent and cannot be extended completely and have a certain coupling among them. Fourth, the underlying ledger structures of Bitcoin and DAG are highly correlated to their security. Specifically, we follow Sompolinsky et al. and detect that the structure of SPECTRE ensures network security and robustness from its block production, conflict resolution, and generated trusted transaction sets. Meanwhile, the voting algorithm of SPECTRE makes resolving conflicting transactions by calculating votes and ensuring the transaction information that is virtually unable to be tampered with possible. In particular, the security calculation power of SPECTRE can reach 51% and resist “double-spend attacks” and “censorship attacks” effectively. In addition, the RDL framework of SPECTRE achieves security confirmation of transferring funds. Moreover, PHANTOM identifies evil blocks by employing block connectivity analysis and ensures its security. Eventually, we also expand the studies of and compare the basic characteristics of the protocols of Bitcoin, SPECTRE, and PHANTOM and find that protocols play imperative roles throughout the implementation process of cryptocurrency. In addition, the underlying ledger structure and consensus mechanism make up a blockchain while the confirmation time, throughput limit, and ordering are prerequisites for smart contracts. (shrink)

If distributed cognition is to become a general analytic frame, it needs to handle more aspects of cognition than just highly efficient problem solving. It should also handle learning. We identify four classes of distributed learning: induction, repurposing, symbiotic tuning, and mutual adaptation. The four classes of distributed learning fit into a two-dimensional space defined by the stability and adaptability of individuals and their environments. In all four classes of learning, people and their environments are highly interdependent (...) during initial learning. At the same time, we present evidence indicating that certain types of interdependence in early learning, most notably mutual adaptation, can help prepare people to be less dependent on their immediate environment and more adaptive when they confront new environments. We also describe and test examples of learning technologies that implement mutual adaptation. (shrink)

12 essays by international specialists in classical antiquity create a period-specific interdisciplinary introduction to distributed cognition and the cognitive humanities - The first book in an ambitious 4-volume set looking at distributed cognition in the history of thought - Includes essays on archaeology, art history, rhetoric, literature, philosophy, science, medicine and technology -For students and scholars in classics, cognitive humanities, philosophy of mind and ancient philosophy -Includes essays by international specialists in classics, ancient history and archaeology This (...) collection explores how cognition is explicitly or implicitly conceived of as distributed across brain, body and world in Greek and Roman technology, science, medicine, material culture, philosophy and literary studies. A range of models emerge, which vary both in terms of whether cognition is just embodied or involves tools or objects in the world. As many of the texts and practices discussed have influenced Western European society and culture, this collection reveals the historical foundations of our theoretical and practical attempts to comprehend the distributed nature of human cognition. (shrink)

Technology's impact on and implications for the social, ethical, political, and cultural dimensions of our world must be seriously considered and addressed. Philosophy of Technology is a clear introduction to one of philosophy's newest issues. Don Ihde critically examines the impact of technological developments on various cultures throughout history-from the earliest feats of engineering and architecture to the cutting-edge developments in artificial intelligence- with an aim to understanding the human implications within a world technological culture. Using a wide (...) variety of concrete examples and illustrations, including artificial intelligence, robotics, and nuclear energy, the author looks at both the current situation and future directions. In a final chapter, he takes the position that the foundational concern for the twenty-first century is the global environment, followed closely by multiculturality and its effect on technoculture, the future of warfare, and the distribution of wealth in a world economy. Special Features Provides an introduction to the best and most recent literature on the subject Places the philosophy of technology within the overall project of philosophy Provides a clear and comprehensive overview of the main issue in the field Promotes understanding of the special role of philosophical criticism Contains a wealth of often humorous and highly imaginative examples that have become the hallmark of this author. (shrink)

To support the teaching of ethics in science and engineering, educational technologies offer a variety of functions: communication between students and instructors, production of documents, distribution of documents, archiving of class sessions, and access to remote resources. Instructors may choose to use these functions of the technologies at different levels of intensity, to support a variety of pedagogies, consistent with accepted good practices. Good pedagogical practices are illustrated in this paper with four examples of uses of educational technologies in the (...) teaching of ethics in science and engineering. Educational technologies impose costs for the purchase of hardware, licensing of software, hiring of support personnel, and training of instructors. Whether the benefits justify these costs is an unsettled question. While many researchers are studying the possible benefits of educational technologies, all instructors should assess the effectiveness of their practices. (shrink)

We are quickly passing through the historical moment when people work in front of a single computer, dominated by a small CRT and focused on tasks involving only local information. Networked computers are becoming ubiquitous and are playing increasingly significant roles in our lives and in the basic infrastructure of science, business, and social interaction. For human-computer interaction o advance in the new millennium we need to better understand the emerging dynamic of interaction in which the focus task is no (...) longer confined to the desktop but reaches into a complex networked world of information and computer-mediated interactions. We think the theory of distributed cognition has a special role to play in understanding interactions between people and technologies, for its focus has always been on whole environments: what we really do in them and how we coordinate our activity in them. Distributed cognition provides a radical reorientation of how to think about designing and supporting human-computer interaction. As a theory it is specifically tailored to understanding interactions among people and technologies. In this article we propose distributed cognition as a new foundation for human-computer interaction, sketch an integrated research framework, and use selections from our earlier work to suggest how this framework can provide new opportunities in the design of digital work materials. (shrink)

This article examines the technological construction of political power, as well as resistance to political power, by means of an "ideal-typical" model called a technolog ical drama. In technological regularization, a design constituency creates artifacts whose features reveal an intention to shape the distribution of wealth, power, or status in society. The design constituency also creates myths, social contexts, and rituals to legitimate its intention and constitute the artifact's political impact. In reply, the people adversely affected by regularization engage in (...) myth-, context-, or artifact-altering strate gies that represent an accommodation to the system or a conscious attempt to change it. A technological drama, in short, is a specifically technological form of political discourse. A key point is that throughout all three processes, political "intentions," no less than the facticity and hardness of the technology's "impact," are themselves constituted and constructed in reciprocal and discursive interaction with technological activities. Technology is not politics pursued by other means; it is politics constructed by technological means. (shrink)

Metacognition is associated with planning, monitoring, evaluating and repairing performance Designers of elearning systems can improve the quality of their environments by explicitly structuring the visual and interactive display of learning contexts to facilitate metacognition. Typically page layout, navigational appearance, visual and interactivity design are not viewed as major factors in metacognition. This is because metacognition tends to be interpreted as a process in the head, rather than an interactive one. It is argued here, that cognition and metacognition are part (...) of a continuum and that both are highly interactive. The tenets of this view are explained by reviewing some of the core assumptions of the situated and distribute approach to cognition and then further elaborated by exploring the notions of active vision, visual complexity, affordance landscape and cue structure. The way visual cues are structured and the way interaction is designed can make an important difference in the ease and effectiveness of cognition and metacognition. Documents that make effective use of markers such as headings, callouts, italics can improve students' ability to comprehend documents and 'plan' the way they review and process content. Interaction can be designed to improve 'the proximal zone of planning' - the look ahead and apprehension of what is nearby in activity space that facilitates decisions. This final concept is elaborated in a discussion of how e-newspapers combine effective visual and interactive design to enhance user control over their reading experience. (shrink)

In this article, I outline various ways in which artifacts are interwoven with autobiographical memory systems and conceptualize what this implies for the self. I first sketch the narrative approach to the self, arguing that who we are as persons is essentially our (unfolding) life story, which, in turn, determines our present beliefs and desires, but also directs our future goals and actions. I then argue that our autobiographical memory is partly anchored in our embodied interactions with an ecology of (...) artifacts in our environment. Lifelogs, photos, videos, journals, diaries, souvenirs, jewelry, books, works of art, and many other meaningful objects trigger and sometimes constitute emotionally-laden autobiographical memories. Autobiographical memory is thus distributed across embodied agents and various environmental structures. To defend this claim, I draw on and integrate distributed cognition theory and empirical research in human-technology interaction. Based on this, I conclude that the self is neither defined by psychological states realized by the brain nor by biological states realized by the organism, but should be seen as a distributed and relational construct. (shrink)

Organisations have eagerly adopted the new opportunities provided by distributed computing technology. These opportunities have also created new dependency on the technology and threats of technical problems. Information technology (IT) management has to choose its position towards these new technical risks. Should the problems be prevented proactively in advance or settled reactively afterwards?This paper draws conclusions from an action research case study aimed at proactive versus reactive end-user support. Between 1994 and 1997 one of the business (...) units in Nokia Telecommunications required a new approach for its distributed information systems (IS) to facilitate rapid organisational growth. The distributed IS and its end-user support were established and organised during a 30-month re-engineering process.These results provide a new view to the dependencies between business processes and IT. The new distributed IT has become, often insidiously, a necessity for vital business processes. Therefore, risk management should be adopted as a standard tool for IS management to identify such dependencies. Proactive actions should be aimed at those areas where IT-related business risks are identified. Proactivity should be supplemented by reactive support to provide daily assistance for the end-users. (shrink)

Distributed Cognition is a hybrid approach to studying all aspects of cognition, from a cognitive, social and organisational perspective. The most well known level of analysis is to account for complex socially distributed cognitive activities, of which a diversity of technological artefacts and other tools and representations are an indispensable part.

In this paper we discuss the hypothesis that, ‘moral agency is distributed over both humans and technological artefacts’, recently proposed by Peter-Paul Verbeek. We present some arguments for thinking that Verbeek is mistaken. We argue that artefacts such as bridges, word processors, or bombs can never be (part of) moral agents. After having discussed some possible responses, as well as a moderate view proposed by Illies and Meijers, we conclude that technological artefacts are neutral tools that are at most (...) bearers of instrumental value. (shrink)

Science and technology are key to economic and social development, yet the capacity for scientific innovation remains globally unequally distributed. Although a priority for development cooperation, building or developing research capacity is often reduced in practice to promoting knowledge transfers, for example through North–South partnerships. Research capacity building/development tends to focus on developing scientists’ technical competencies through training, without parallel investments to develop and sustain the socioeconomic and political structures that facilitate knowledge creation. This, the paper argues, significantly (...) contributes to the scientific divide between developed and developing countries more than any skills shortage. Using Charles Taylor’s concept of irreducibly social goods, the paper extends Sen’s Capabilities Approach beyond its traditional focus on individual entitlements to present a view of scientific knowledge as a social good and the capability to produce it as a social capability. Expanding this capability requires going beyond current fragmented approaches to research capacity building to holistically strengthen the different social, political and economic structures that make up a nation’s innovation system. This has implications for the interpretation of human rights instruments beyond their current focus on access to knowledge and for focusing science policy and global research partnerships to design approaches to capacity building/development beyond individual training/skills building. (shrink)

While, prima facie, virtue/credit approaches in epistemology would appear to be in tension with distributed/extended approaches in cognitive science, Pritchard () has recently argued that the tension here is only apparent, at least given a weak version of distributed cognition, which claims merely that external resources often make critical contributions to the formation of true belief, and a weak virtue theory, which claims merely that, whenever a subject achieves knowledge, his cognitive agency makes a significant contribution to the (...) formation of a true belief. But the significance of the role played by the subject's cognitive agency in distributed cognitive systems is in fact highly variable: at one extreme, formation of a true belief seems clearly to be significantly creditable to the subject's agency; at the other extreme, however, the subject's agency plays such a peripheral role that it is at best unclear whether it should receive significant credit for formation of a true belief. The compatibility of distributed cognition and virtue epistemology thus turns on what it takes for a contribution to the formation of true belief to count as significant. This article argues that the inevitable vagueness of this notion suggests retreating from virtue epistemology to a form of process reliabilism and explores the prospects for a distributed reliabilist epistemology designed to fit smoothly with distributed cognition. In effect, distributed reliabilism radicalizes Goldberg's recent extended reliabilist view by allowing the process the reliability of which determines the epistemic status of a subject's belief to extend to include not only processing performed by other subjects but also processing performed by non-human technological resources. (shrink)

New technologies are often radical innovations that change current activities across different areas of social and economic life. At the beginning of the 21st century, some of these technologies are information and communications technology, nanotechnology, biotechnology, robotics, and artificial intelligence. These innovations stimulate new opportunities for the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services, and thus can help solve social problems. But they also cause new social risks and inequalities.