Technology and the self: A new deity

One of the central challenges for any culture is that of securing an acceptable, if not virtuous mode of collective life. In effect, every culture is challenged by what we may loosely term a moral project, an attempt to achieve a sustainable and agreeable (as opposed to an agonistic and ultimately self-destroying) mode of cultural life. At least since the Enlightenment, we in western culture have wished to answer this challenge by some means other than force of arms. Rather, in place of this crude form of control, we have generally wished to link institutional order to a rational scaffold. That is, we have sought to generate an intelligibility that can be shared by all, and the implications of which are realized through various institutional traditions. For over three centuries, hopes for the moral society have rested on two major and conflicting rationales, the one centered on individual moral deliberation, and the other on community commitment. These two fulcra of moral action serve as the chief focus of the present offering.

The article uses Eastern Orthodox thinker Christos Yannaras' conception of personhood as a theological criterion for examining the ethical use of new information technologies.

EASST Review, 2016

Which horizons can we imagine for subjectivity in the global digital society? Which technologies of the self can somehow re-establish a relationship with the individual and collective self? How might the technical and scientific progress change, or even enhance, subjectivity? What do we mean when we say ‘digital subjectivity’? The session entitled ‘Digital subjectivities in the global context: new technologies of the self’ tried to answer some of these questions.

Recherches de Science Religieuse, 2023

[French title: Interpréter l’humain – l’Imago Dei à l’heure du numérique] Artificial intelligence programs are becoming impressively competent at tasks previously regarded as typically human, such as language and art generation or image recognition, inching toward a level of intelligence that matches or even surpasses our own. From a theological perspective, there are concerns that such developments could invalidate the intuition of human distinctiveness, encapsulated in the imago Dei doctrine, rendering us unremarkable and perhaps replaceable. In this article, I argue that such concerns are unwarranted. Technological developments actually represent an opportunity to enrich and re-articulate our theological anthropology by hinting at the true markers of human distinctiveness: not rationality and problem-solving, but authentic personal relationality and vulnerabilty. For imago Dei theology, this means moving away from older substantive models, towards proposals that are eminently relational.

The increased use and development of technology in modern society has privileged human consciousness and decision-making to an exclusive and powerful elite. The technological system thrives by feeding on chaotic information, and digesting it into abstract lists and numbers, preanalyzed and categorized. The only decision left for the human consumer is that of regulation. With the prevailing technology implying much of the decisions we make, the question of free will and identity comes to question. Recent studies in biotechnology have 'revealed' the processes of the human brain and have redefined intelligence, thinking and consciousness. The gradual reduction of 'human intelligence' to processes that can be measured, and the reverse engineering and imitation of the neurological system in artificial intelligence has collapsed the boundaries of human and machine.

Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century

My concern with historical transformations in the conception of self has its own history. Its earliest traces can be found in my 1973 essay, " Social psychology as history , " where I proposed that as scientii c accounts of the person enter society, so can they alter the commonly shared visions of self. Authoritative accounts of brain determination of human action, for example, can shit the way in which we understand ourselves and our behavior. h e sense of self, in this case, becomes no more than an artifact of brain stimulation. And with shit s in understanding, so are the cultural mores set in motion and institutional policies transformed. Such concerns gained momentum in the later development of social constructionist theory (Gergen, 1994), and its focus on the historical and cultural lodgement of self-understanding (see, e.g., Graumann & Gergen, 1996). Most central to the present essay, however, was my 1992 book, h e Saturated Self. h is work was centrally concerned with the twentieth century emergence of communication technology and its potentials for transforming the common conception of self. My particular focus in this work was on the Western tradition of individualism in which the origins of action are traced to psychological processes within the person. For much of Western culture, the concept of the individual self-the conscious and cognizant agent of action-is more or less accepted as a natural fact. In courts of law we hold individuals responsible for their actions; in educational settings, we hold individuals responsible for their work; in therapy we treat individual suf ering; and in our democracy each individual is endowed with the right to a vote. Yet, this concept of the individual agent is also peculiarly Western and largely a by-product of cultural developments emerging in the seventeenth and culminating in the twentieth century (see, e.g., Seigel, 2005 ; Taylor, 1992). It is a view to which philosophers such as Descartes, Locke, and Kant

2022

This white paper aims to distil some of the Christian principles salient in an evaluation of how the widespread deployment of artificial intelligence challenges how we relate to God, to other humans, and to ourselves.

Nursing Philosophy, 2015

This philosophical enquiry considers the impact of a global world view and technology on the meaning of being human. The global vision increases our awareness of the common bond between all humans, while technology tends to separate us from an understanding of ourselves as human persons. We review some advances in connecting as community within our world, and many examples of technological changes. This review is not exhaustive. The focus is to understand enough changes to think through the possibility of healthcare professionals becoming cyborgs, human-machine units that are subsequently neither human and nor machine. It is seen that human technology interfaces are a different way of interacting but do not change what it is to be human in our rational capacities of providing meaningful speech and freely chosen actions. In the highly technical environment of the ICU, expert nurses work in harmony with both the technical equipment and the patient. We used Heidegger to consider the nature of equipment, and Descartes to explore unique human capacities. Aristotle, Wallace, Sokolowski, and Clarke provide a summary of humanity as substantial and relational.

2013

This paper takes an actor network theory approach to explore some of the ways that algorithms co-construct identity and relational meaning in contemporary use of social media. Based on intensive interviews with participants as well as activity logging and data tracking, the author presents a richly layered set of accounts to help build our understanding of how individuals relate to their devices, search systems, and social network sites. This work extends critical analyses of the power of algorithms in implicating the social self by offering narrative accounts from multiple perspectives. It also contributes an innovative method for blending actor network theory with symbolic interaction to grapple with the complexity of everyday sensemaking practices within networked global information flows.

asks whether in the midst of a techno-cultural revolution the traditional conceptions of self and community continue to secure a morally viable society. Gergen examines the erosion of both individualism and communalism (and their associated institutions) by the accumulating " technologies of sociation, " the host of relatively low-cost technologies that dramatically expand and intensify social connection. He considers the effects of these technologies on the experience of a private self and argues that cumulatively they undermine the presumption of the individual as the locus of moral agency.