1st Edition
The Ethos of Digital Environments Technology, Literary Theory and Philosophy
While self-driving cars and autonomous weapon systems have received a great deal of attention in media and research, the general requirements of ethical life in today’s digitalizing reality have not been made sufficiently visible and evaluable. This collection of articles from both distinguished and emerging authors working at the intersections of philosophy, literary theory, media, and technology does not intend to fix new moral rules. Instead, the volume explores the ethos of digital environments, asking how we can orient ourselves in them and inviting us to renewed moral reflection in the face of dilemmas they entail. The authors show how contemporary digital technologies model our perception, narration as well as our conceptions of truth, and investigate the ethical, moral, and juridical consequences of making public and societal infrastructures computational. They argue that we must make the structures of the digital environments visible and learn to care for them.
Introduction: From Solving Mechanical Dilemmas to Taking Care of Digital Ecology
Susanna Lindberg and Hanna-Riikka Roine
Should a Self-driving Car
Eino Santanen
PART 1
Digital Ecologies Today
1 Three Species Challenges: Toward a General Ecology of Cognitive Assemblages
N. Katherine Hayles
PART 2
The Ethos: Description and Formation
2 Viral Storytelling as the Contemporary Narrative Didacticism: Deriving Universal Truths from Arbitrary Narratives of Personal Experience
Maria Mäkelä
3 Authorship vs. Assemblage in Digital Media
Hanna-Riikka Roine and Laura Piippo
4 The Logic of Selection and Poetics of Cultural Interfaces: A Literature of Full Automation?
Matti Kangaskoski
5 Ghosts Beyond the Machine: "Schizoid Nondroids" and Fictions of Surveillance Capitalism
Esko Suoranta
PART 3
The Ethos: Entanglement and Delegation
6 The Zombies of the Digital: What Justice Should We Wait For?
Frédéric Neyrat
7 Just Machines. On Algorithmic Ethos and Justice
Susanna Lindberg
8 Automation: Between Factuality and Normativity
Marc-Antoine Pencolé
9 How Agents Lost Their Cognitive Capacities within the Computational Evolution of Market Competition
Anna Longo
10 Thinking about Google Search as #DigitalColonialism
Joshua Adams
PART 4
The Ethos: Thinking, Computing, and Ethics
11 The Light of Morality and the Light of the Machine
François-David Sebbah
12 What Do We Call "Thinking" in the Age of Artificial Intelligence and Moral Machines?
Anne Alombert
13 Can a Machine Have a Soul?
Daniel Ross
14 The Chiasm: Thinking Things and Thinging Thoughts. Our Being with Technology
Lars Botin
Biography
Susanna Lindberg is Professor of Continental Philosophy at the University of Leiden, Netherlands.
Hanna-Riikka Roine is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Academy of Finland.
