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What is the problem to which AI chatbots are the solution? AI ethics through Don Ihde's embodiment, hermeneutic, alterity, and background relationships
... Few articles discuss ChatGPT postphenomenologically. Mikael Laaksoharju and colleagues look at ChatGPT through Ihde's four types of human-technology relations-the embodiment, hermeneutic, alterity, and background relations-and their ethical implications (Laaksoharju et al., 2023). A master's thesis by Víctor B. Yáñez discusses ChatGPT through Derridean deconstruction theory and Ihdean postphenomenology, focusing on implicit "structural dangers" of interacting with ChatGPT (Betriu Yáñez, 2023). ...
... Nonetheless, Ihde (1993) enables us to speculate about ChatGPT's hermeneutic activity. Laaksoharju et al. (2023) engaged in an analysis of ChatGPT through Ihde's four determinant types of human-technology relations; among which the hermeneutic relation. They suggested that as we read the information provided by ChatGPT, ChatGPT, therefore, necessarily mediates between us and the world. ...
... According to Ihde's hermeneutic relation between humans and technological artifacts (1993), and as further developed by Verbeek (2005) and applied to ChatGPT by Laaksoharju et al. (2023), what ChatGPT does is that it performs the hermeneutic activity in a way that is by many orders of magnitude more complex than, say, a thermometer. A thermometer is not a generative technology but a mechanical one based on the physicochemical properties of mercury (it indicates the temperature through the expansion or contraction of the fluid inside the device). ...
This paper analyzes ChatGPT, and other large language models, using Don Ihde’s postphenomenological framework. Ihde helps immensely to understand how ChatGPT goes beyond the classical understanding of the technological mediation of reality to the human, according to which the human alone would engage in hermeneutics. Commonly, ChatGPT is explained as merely calculating probabilities upon serially aligning words. However, adding a speculative postanthropocentric twist to Ihde’s framework, we suggest an explanation for how ChatGPT itself—by virtue of its ability to ‘understand’ text upon ‘reading’ an input and ‘writing’ a meaningful output—necessarily acts as a kind of hermeneutic agent. Firstly, this radicalizes the classical anthropocentric conception of hermeneutics. Secondly, ChatGPT’s hermeneutic character carries a significant potential for performing how we perceive and relate to reality. Not only in the sense that ChatGPT can reify the idea that normative labels and categories alone are apt at representing the world. And, not only in the sense that ChatGPT can ossify particular ways of phrasing the world. But, perhaps more thought-provokingly so, also in the sense that ChatGPT can perform the human—at least to some extent—with ChatGPT’s own synthetically generated perception of reality.
... Overall, this integrated embodiment concept of AI draws its materialist character from the individual and collective corporeality of relevant social actors such as users, scientists, developers, ethicists, etc. involved in an AI-focused sociotechnical debate; from their socially embodied perspectives, they drive "the interrogation of specialised epistemic communities through engagement with technical aspects of their practical and discursive conventions" ( [76], p. 253), Mol [78] refers to this integrated practice of technology ethics as 'ontological politics' recurrently negotiating a "reality [which] is historically, culturally and materially located" ( [78], p. 75). Moreover, Don Ihde's postphenomenology captures the relational aspects of AI technology mediating the human perception of the world in human-AI interaction, which has been applied to AI ethics [79]. "With respect to anti-Cartesianism", Ihde's approach "follow[s] the phenomenological revolt that deconstructs what Haraway calls 'god-tricks' by recognizing the role of embodiment" ( [80], p.68). ...
Applications of artificial intelligence (AI) bear great transformative potential in the economic, technological and social sectors, impacting especially future work environments. Ethical regulation of AI requires a relational understanding of the technology by relevant stakeholder groups such as researchers, developers, politicians, civil servants, affected workers or other users applying AI in their work processes. The purpose of this paper is to support relational AI discourse for an improved ethical framing and regulation of the technology. The argumentation emphasizes a widespread reembodied understanding of AI technology as critical requirement for capable ethical and regulatory frameworks. A sociotechnical perspective encourages the material interpretation of AI as reembodied adaptation of biological intelligence. Reviewing Cartesian dualism as motivating the disembodiment of human intelligence for its transfer to machines, the argumentation develops an integrated embodiment concept of AI in its mechanistic, naturalistic, combined AI and neuroethical, and relational contexts. This concept is discussed in relation to basic phenomenological and postphenomenological assumptions, and is applied to the example of AI-based neurotechnology potentially disrupting future work processes. Strengthening a human-centered approach, the presented concept for a reembodied understanding of AI technology enables better integrated ethical and regulatory debates, and improves social discourse and human agency in developing and regulating AI technology.
... Complex Machine Learning algorithms enable new scientific practices of data interpretation and so create a new situation of scientific explanation of nature and human beings (Kudina & de Boer, 2021). While postphenomenology has analyzed AI from various perspectives, such as technological intentionality in artificial neural networks (Mykhailov & Liberati, 2022), algorithmic biases and non-neutrality of AI models (Wellner & Rothman, 2020), the problem of the black-box (Friedrich et al., 2022) and recent postphenomenology of ChatGPT (Laaksoharju et al., 2023), the progress in the field of AI over the last several months has brought forth radically new challenges that must be addressed from a strong philosophical standpoint. With this in mind, the present special issue aims to grasp the dynamic landscape of contemporary AI technology by applying a postphenomenological methodology. ...
This is a call for papers in the special issue "Postphenomenology in the Age of AI: Prospects, Challenges, Opportunities" for the Journal of Human-Technology Relations.
Guest Editor - Dr. Dmytro Mykhailov
For more details, please check the file attached or visit a webpage for the special issue - https://journals.open.tudelft.nl/jhtr/announcement/view/401
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