Quipping Equipment: Apropos of Robots and Kantian Chatbots

anthropology and technology, human-machine interactions
Authors:
Abstract:

Robots, Bourdieu, Kant, and Sex – Coeckelbergh’s philosophy of technical assemblages has it all. This commentary considers his early work “on the linguistic construction of artificial others” in light of his later elaboration of a general theory of human-technology interaction. Coeckelbergh draws on “habitus”-theory, virtue ethics and a historically recontextualized Kantianism to propose nothing less than a new general moral philosophy for the technoscientific age. In so doing, he also conjures up something beguilingly elusive if not impossible – a pluralist personalism. Readers vested in pluralist accounts of agency and epistemic contingency will appreciate his invoking Bourdieu and Kant, thinkers prioritizing communalist over particularist interests. Readers of a personalist bent will welcome the voluntarism of his moral regimen – they like their reality served up in person-shaped bits, a perspective that prioritizes self-direction and self-possession. Two for the price of one: here everyone feels affirmed. Coeckelbergh appears to take the defining parameters of experience to be wholly contextual and, in equal measure, intrinsic. In squaring the circle, he also showcases a lurid scenario: sex with robots. The electrifying effect of this bold composition is to set the mind racing toward a position more coherent and less familiar than pluralist personalism. Central to this position is a conception of Gemüt as emergent reflexivity. Its consideration takes us via Immanuel Kant and Kant-Culture Research to such strange aberrations as corporate cannibalism and cyborg pillow talk. – This is one of six commentaries on a 2011-paper by Mark Coeckelbergh: “You, robot: on the linguistic construction of artificial others.” Coeckelbergh‘s response also appears in this issue of Technology and Language.

Funding:

This paper was written in the context of the theoretical module of the VW-foundation funded research project on „Commodified Agency. Social Space and the Digital Data Value Chain,“ based at the Leuphana University Lüneburg. I would like to thank Simon Schaffer (Cambridge University, UK), Ulf Wuggenig (Leuphana University Lüneburg), Karen Ruoff Kramer (Stanford University), David Kramer (Alice-Salomon Hochschule, Berlin) and Faris Al-Mashat (BTU Cottbus) for their incisive comments and generous engagement with the writing and ideas developed here. I would also like to thank Alfred Nordmann (TU Darmstadt) and Maureen Belaski (Belaski Design) for longstanding conversations on sentient relationality.

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