Support in Times of Digitization

2018

This book shows the advantages of using different perspectives and scientific backgrounds for developing support technologies that are integrated into daily life. It highlights the interaction between people and technology as a key factor for achieving this integration and discusses relevant methods, concepts, technologies, and applications suitable for interdisciplinary exchange and collaboration. The relationship between humans and technology has become much more inclusive and interdependent. This generates a number of technical, ethical, social, and practical issues. By gathering contributions from scholars from heterogeneous research fields, such as biomechanics, various branches of engineering, the social sciences, information science, psychology, and philosophy, this book is intended to provide answers to the main questions arising when support technologies such as assistance systems, wearable devices, augmented reality, and/or robot-based systems are constructed, implemented, interfaced and/or evaluated across different application contexts.

International Journal of Technology Management, 2017

In this article we discuss the futures of work and robotics. We evaluate key future trends in the field of robotics and analyse different scenarios regarding the futures of human beings and work life. Subsequently, we present a roadmap of robotics, which covers key aspects of industrial and service robotics, discuss technology foresight insights and inter-linkages to robotics, and identify three critical technology roadmaps: the technological future of robotics, digitalisation and ICT technologies. Finally, we analyse economic, social, and political key challenges of the digital transformation of work and labour policy in the European Union in general and against the backdrop of the European robotics strategy in particular.

GI-Jahrestagung, 2017

One of the greatest societal challenges right now can be seen in the design of the interaction between human and technology. Especially in recent years this has become more intense. In almost all life situations, we are already supported or assisted by technology. Such systems come in various forms and characteristics. This paper will report on an ongoing research project named smartASSIST which aims to establish methods for the development of wearable systems for physical support as well as exemplary supporting technologies. The research is based upon a theoretical foundation of human-machine support relations which leads to the conceptual approach of constructing Human-Hybrid-Robot (HHR) systems.

International Robotics & Automation Journal, 2017

This paper reflects on the need for designing automated systems that can lead to the creation of work organization that professes social harmony between the automated technical and the human systems towards enhanced productivity. The aim is to argue for the development of the requisite knowledge in the application of digitized/ automated systems that allows for open collaboration between the technological functions and the workforce that will make cross value chain optimization a reality. It is posited analytic strategies for examining mediated action between the human and an automated system can be made possible by isolating its elements. Such isolation allows various specialized perspectives to bring their insights to bear, and also serves as key to understanding how change occurs in the mediated action. Through such understanding, an innovative work organization that enhances social collaboration between automated systems and humans can be designed towards increased productivity.

I-com, 2017

One of the greatest societal challenges right now can be seen in the design of the interaction between human and technology. Especially in recent years this has become more intense. In almost all life situations, we are already supported or assisted by technology. Such systems come in various forms and characteristics. This paper will report on an ongoing research project named smartASSIST which aims to establish methods for the development of wearable systems for physical support as well as exemplary supporting technologies. The research is based upon a theoretical foundation of human-machine support relations which leads to the conceptual approach of constructing Human-Hybrid-Robot (HHR) systems.

Smart and Sustainable Collaborative Networks 4.0, 2021

Automation throughout history has caused profound changes in employment dynamics. With the advent of the fourth industrial revolution, a new threat may affect employability, as robots and AI-based processes can now assume tasks considered exclusive to humans. This position paper aims to motivate the study of the effects of AI and automation on employability, extending it into a collaborative network perspective. The problem is firstly observed from a historical perspective. The collaboration aspects are considered through the analysis of two case studies. Results suggest that a latent element of collaborative networks, complexity, may have effects in terms of employability.

The design of work organisation systems with automated equipment is facing new challenges and the emergence of new concepts. The social aspects that are related with new concepts on the complex work environments (CWE) are becoming more relevant for that design. The work with autonomous systems implies options in the design of workplaces. Especially that happens in such complex environments. The concepts of "agents", "co-working" or "human-centred technical systems" reveal new dimensions related to human-computer interaction (HCI). With an increase in the number and complexity of those human-technology interfaces, the capacities of human intervention can become limited, originating further problems. The case of robotics is used to exemplify the issues related with automation in working environments and the emergence of new HCI approaches that would include social implications. We conclude that studies on technology assessment of industrial robotics and autonomous agents on manufacturing environment should also focus on the human involvement strategies in organisations. A needed participatory strategy implies a new approach to workplaces design. This means that the research focus must be on the relation between technology and social dimensions not as separate entities, but integrated in the design of an interaction system.

The dissertation proposes the outlines of a sociology of machines for understanding human-machine relations, especially those that exceed the dominant normative frameworks. Bringing together social theory, artificial intelligence research, and human-machine interaction literature, the dissertation argues for the need to devote attention to alternative realities with technologies from a sociological perspective. This move serves as a critique of the dominant manner in which technologies are thought with, which is as means to the demands of an instrumental rationality. In the face of threats to other forms of life and relationality, the thesis insists on doing things otherwise, including sociological conduct itself. The thesis proposes using creative methodologies such as research-creation as a way to reinvigorate sociology to develop its capacity to address the multiplicity of human machine relations.

Ethics in Progress, 2019

Machines have always been a tool or technical instrument for human beings to facilitate and to accelerate processes through mechanical power. The same applies to robots nowadays – the next step in the evolution of machines. Over the course of the last few years, robot usage in society has expanded enormously, and they now carry out a remarkable number of tasks for us. It seems we are on the eve of a historic revolution that will change everything we know right now. But not only robots have an impact on our life. It is digitization in its entirety, including smart applications and games, that confronts us with new spaces. This special volume of Ethics in Progress tries to broaden our understanding of a philosophical field – robots and digitization – that is still in its infancy in terms of it research and literature.

nformation, Communication, and Automation Technology Ethics in the Knowledge Society Age, 2018

The thoughts presented and discussed in this essay all point to the critical conception that technology is never in any general sense ‘neutral’, although, as I will try to show, modern technology and its (techno)scientific base is quite largely, although sometimes implicitly and unconsciously, understood to be so. The reason for this non-neutrality is, as I will argue, that technology and its science is always and inescapably rooted in and informed by human interpersonal relationships. Moreover, technology is thus also always embedded in a cultural context. Or differently put, an irreducible part of social organization and its imagination, worldview and ideology. Throughout the essay I will place in dialogue contemporary issues and phenomena revolving around (especially) automation technology with the visions, claims and notions of Francis Bacon and René Descartes, two of the most influential programmatic pioneers of modern technoscience. In sections two and three this dialogical exchange centers on social, political and economic issues with a special focus on the themes of labor and equality. The fourth and final section transitions over to a critical discussion on how the modern technoscientific imagination, with its technological understanding of truth/nature/being, is conceived as answering and overcoming existential concerns about human life and its mindedness.