Mark Coeckelbergh
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 243137 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Mark Coeckelbergh |
| PRENOMES | Mark |
| SOBRENOME | Coeckelbergh |
| ASSINATURA | COECKELBERGH M |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of Vienna |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9576-1002 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 85 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 134 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 85 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 1 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1978 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 6 |
The quasi-gods of algorithmic providence
Recommender systems now mediate information exposure for over half the global population daily, shaping beliefs, values, and life decisions at unprecedented scale. Prior research has documented polarization effects, responsibility gaps in autonomous systems, and patterns of AI sacralization in public discourse. Philosophy of technology has established that such systems function as socio-technical assemblages with world-making power rather than ne…
Technofascism
The rapid development of digital technologies, including AI, is having a significant impact on the social, economic, and political life. Yet, while presented as milestones in innovation and progress, these technological transformations have also introduced mechanisms of control, forms of organization, and ideological patterns that bear striking resemblances to historical fascist phenomena. Moreover, in parallel and increasingly intersecting with …
Prophetic memory
A new breed of prophets – intermediaries and pastoral bros of an AI industry with metaphysical aspirations – has surfaced on the global stage during troubled times. They make great promises, offer predictions and warnings, and stake out directions for humanity. This article argues that they do so by invoking the implicit collective memory of the apocalyptic imaginary known from ancient Jewish apocalyptic writings and, more specifically, by reenac…
AI and Epistemic Agency
Artificial intelligence, the common good, and the democratic deficit in AI governance
There is a broad consensus that artificial intelligence should contribute to the common good, but it is not clear what is meant by that. This paper discusses this issue and uses it as a lens for analysing what it calls the “democracy deficit” in current AI governance, which includes a tendency to deny the inherently political character of the issue and to take a technocratic shortcut. It indicates what we may agree on and what is and should be up…
Myth, Angst, and AI
AI is often called a ‘myth’, in the sense that there is a gap between the promises and the actual technology. But there are deeper and more productive connections between myth and AI, and more generally, myth and technology. This paper argues that myths are important ways in which cultures make sense of technology and that studying and working on myths is needed for critically evaluating our relation to AI. It supports this claim (1) by establish…
The case for global governance of AI
It is increasingly recognized that as artificial intelligence becomes more powerful and pervasive in society and creates risks and ethical issues that cross borders, a global approach is needed for the governance of these risks. But why, exactly, do we need this and what does that mean? In this Open Forum paper, author argues for global governance of AI for moral reasons but also outlines the governance challenges that this project raises
Politiquette
How can liberal thinking deal with identity and recognition matters in politics? This long-standing question in political philosophy has gained new relevance and urgency in the face of issues concerning offense and censorship in digital social media, especially in the light of the use of AI. Typically, there are two competing views on this issue: a classical liberal one, according to which identity has no place in politics and free speech is para…
From MilkingBots to RoboDolphins
Technologies, especially disruptive technologies, have a great potential to change and reshape human-human as well as human-technology relations. This creates various ethical challenges that need to be addressed. However, technologies also have great potential to change human-animal relations. Since this aspect is underexplored in the academic debate on technologies’ impact on relations, we believe that it is important to (1), descriptively, stud…
All too real metacapitalism
Current techno-utopian visions of metaverse raise ontological, ethical, and political questions. Drawing on existing literature on virtual worlds but also philosophically moving beyond that body of work and responding to political contexts concerning identity, capitalism, and climate, this paper begins to address these questions by offering a conceptual framework to think about the ontology of metaverse(s) in ways that see metaverse as real, expe…
Social Assistive Robotics
The development of social assistive robots for supporting healthcare provision faces a lack of an ethical approach that adequately addresses the normatively relevant challenges regarding its deployment. Current ethical reflection is primarily informed by an individual-centered perspective focused on robots’ implications for their end-users and thereby limited to the dyadic human–robot interaction sphere. Considering that this is tightly correlate…
ChatGPT
Large language models such as ChatGPT enable users to automatically produce text but also raise ethical concerns, for example about authorship and deception. This paper analyses and discusses some key philosophical assumptions in these debates, in particular assumptions about authorship and language and—our focus—the use of the appearance/reality distinction. We show that there are alternative views of what goes on with ChatGPT that do not rely o…
Connecting the dots in trustworthy Artificial Intelligence
Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence (AI) is based on seven technical requirements sustained over three main pillars that should be met throughout the system’s entire life cycle: it should be (1) lawful, (2) ethical, and (3) robust, both from a technical and a social perspective. However, attaining truly trustworthy AI concerns a wider vision that comprises the trustworthiness of all processes and actors that are part of the system’s life cycle, a…
Searching for the Good Life
How to do robots with words
Moral status arguments are typically formulated as descriptive statements that tell us something about the world. But philosophy of language teaches us that language can also be used performatively: we do things with words and use words to try to get others to do things. Does and should this theory extend to what we say about moral status, and what does it mean? Drawing on Austin, Searle, and Butler and further developing relational views of mora…
Narrative responsibility and artificial intelligence
Most accounts of responsibility focus on one type of responsibility, moral responsibility, or address one particular aspect of moral responsibility such as agency. This article outlines a broader framework to think about responsibility that includes causal responsibility, relational responsibility, and what I call “narrative responsibility” as a form of “hermeneutic responsibility”, connects these notions of responsibility with different kinds of…
Climate change and the political pathways of AI
It is generally thought that artificial intelligence (AI) has a significant impact on politics and democracy. Meanwhile, the technology is also often hailed a solution to key societal and environmental challenges. It raises questions regarding, for example, how we can and should deal with climate change. This article links and discusses these issues by putting them in the context of a technocracy-democracy dilemma and by using the concept of crit…
Digital Technologies, Temporality, and the Politics of Co-Existence
Using Philosophy of Language in Philosophy of Technology
Many philosophers of technology focus on technological artifacts, especially after the empirical turn; this has led to a neglect of the roles language plays with regard to technology. But it could be helpful for further theory development to reflect more on relations between language and technology and to learn from philosophy of language. This chapter contributes to filling this gap and explores how philosophy of language can be used in philosop…
Nonhuman Value
Digital Technologies, Temporality, and the Politics of Co-Existence
This book analyzes how digital technology shapes our relation to time and our existence and what this means in the light of climate change and AI
The Ubuntu Robot
Recently there has been more attention to the cultural aspects of social robots. This paper contributes to this effort by offering a philosophical, in particular Wittgensteinian framework for conceptualizing in what sense and how robots are related to culture and by exploring what it would mean to create an "Ubuntu Robot". In addition, the paper gestures towards a more culturally diverse and more relational approach to social robotics and emphasi…
Robot Ethics
Does kindness towards robots lead to virtue? A reply to Sparrow’s asymmetry argument
Does cruel behavior towards robots lead to vice, whereas kind behavior does not lead to virtue? This paper presents a critical response to Sparrow’s argument that there is an asymmetry in the way we (should) think about virtue and robots. It discusses how much we should praise virtue as opposed to vice, how virtue relates to practical knowledge and wisdom, how much illusion is needed for it to be a barrier to virtue, the relation between virtue a…
How to Use Virtue Ethics for Thinking About the Moral Standing of Social Robots
Social robots are designed to facilitate interaction with humans through “social” behavior. As literature in the field of human–robot interaction shows, this sometimes leads to “bad” behavior towards the robot or “abuse” of the robot. Virtue ethics offers a helpful way to capture the intuition that although nobody is harmed when a robot is “mistreated”, there is still something wrong with this kind of behavior: it damages the moral character of t…
Humans, Animals, and Robots
You, robot
How can we make sense of the idea of ‘personal’ or ‘social’ relations with robots? Starting from a social and phenomenological approach to human–robot relations, this paper explores how we can better understand and evaluate these relations by attending to the ways our conscious experience of the robot and the human–robot relation is mediated by language. It is argued that our talk about and to robots is not a mere representation of an objective r…
A Survey of Expectations About the Role of Robots in Robot-Assisted Therapy for Children with ASD
Technology and the good society
Artificial Companions
Under what conditions can robots become companions and what are the ethical issues that might arise in human-robot companionship relations? I argue that the possibility and future of robots as companions depends (among other things) on the robot s capacity to be a recipient of human empathy, and that one necessary condition for this to happen is that the robot mirrors human vulnerabilities. For the purpose of these arguments, I make a distinction…
Facing Animals
Climate change and the political pathways of AI
It is generally thought that artificial intelligence (AI) has a significant impact on politics and democracy. Meanwhile, the technology is also often hailed a solution to key societal and environmental challenges. It raises questions regarding, for example, how we can and should deal with climate change. This article links and discusses these issues by putting them in the context of a technocracy-democracy dilemma and by using the concept of crit…
Technology Games
Regulation or Responsibility? Autonomy, Moral Imagination, and Engineering
A prima facie analysis suggests that there are essentially two, mutually exclusive, ways in which risk arising from engineering design can be managed: by imposing external constraints on engineers or by engendering their feelings of responsibility and respect their autonomy. The author discusses the advantages and disadvantages of both approaches. However, he then shows that this opposition is a false one and that there is no simple relation betw…
Three Responses to Anthropomorphism in Social Robotics
Both designers and users of social robots tend to anthropomorphize robots. Focusing on the question how to conceptualize the relation between robots and humans, this paper first outlines two opposite philosophical views regarding this relation, which are connected to various normative responses to anthropomorphism and anthropomorphization. Then it argues for a third view: navigating between what it calls “naïve instrumentalism” and “uncritical po…
Narrative Technologies
Contemporary philosophy of technology, in particular mediation theory, has largely neglected language and has paid little attention to the social-linguistic environment in which technologies are used. In order to reintroduce and strengthen these two missing aspects we turn towards Ricoeur’s narrative theory. We argue that technologies have a narrative capacity: not only do humans make sense of technologies by means of narratives but technologies …
Distributive Justice and Co-Operation in a World of Humans and Non-Humans
The Ubuntu Robot
Recently there has been more attention to the cultural aspects of social robots. This paper contributes to this effort by offering a philosophical, in particular Wittgensteinian framework for conceptualizing in what sense and how robots are related to culture and by exploring what it would mean to create an "Ubuntu Robot". In addition, the paper gestures towards a more culturally diverse and more relational approach to social robotics and emphasi…
Wittgenstein as a Philosopher of Technology
The work of Ludwig Wittgenstein is seldom used by philosophers of technology, let alone in a systematic way, and in general there has been little discussion about the role of language in relation to technology. Conversely, Wittgenstein scholars have paid little attention to technology in the work of Wittgenstein. In this paper we read the Philosophical Investigations and On Certainty in order to explore the relation between language use and techn…
Imagination and Principles
What does it mean to say that imagination plays a role in moral reasoning, and what are the theoretical and practical implications? Engaging with three traditions in moral theory and confronting them
Earth, Technology, Language
The empirical turn, understood as a turn to the artifact in the work of Ihde, has been a fruitful one, which has rightly abandoned what Serres and Latour call "the empire of signs" of the postmoderns. However, this has unfortunately implied too little attention for language and its relation to technology. The same can be said about the social dimension of technology use, which is largely neglected in postphenomenology. This talk critically respon…
AI and Epistemic Agency
Mallory-Weiss Syndrome
Regulation or Responsibility? Autonomy, Moral Imagination, and Engineering
A prima facie analysis suggests that there are essentially two, mutually exclusive, ways in which risk arising from engineering design can be managed: by imposing external constraints on engineers or by engendering their feelings of responsibility and respect their autonomy. The author discusses the advantages and disadvantages of both approaches. However, he then shows that this opposition is a false one and that there is no simple relation betw…
Who needs empathy? A response to Goldie's arguments against empathy and suggestions for an account of mutual perspective-shifting in contexts of help and care1
According to an influential view, empathy has, and should have, a role in ethics, but it is by no means clear what is meant by ‘empathy’, and why exactly it is supposed to be morally good. Recently, Peter Goldie has challenged that view. He shows how problematic empathy is, and argues that taking an external perspective is morally superior: we should focus on the other, rather than ourselves. But this argument is misguided in several ways. If we …
Principles or Imagination? Two Approaches to Global Justice
What does it mean to introduce the notion of imagination in the discussion about global justice? What is gained by studying the role of imagination in thinking about global justice? Does a focus on imagination imply that we must replace existing influential principle-centred approaches such as that of John Rawls and his critics? We can distinguish between two approaches to global justice. One approach is Rawlsian and Kantian in inspiration. Discu…
Imagination and Principles
What does it mean to say that imagination plays a role in moral reasoning, and what are the theoretical and practical implications? Engaging with three traditions in moral theory and confronting them
Personal Robots, Appearance, and Human Good
The development of pet robots, toy robots, and sex robots suggests a near-future scenario of habitual living with ‘personal’ robots. How should we evaluate their potential impact on the quality of our lives and existence? In this paper, I argue for an approach to ethics of personal robots that advocates a methodological turn from robots to humans, from mind to interaction, from intelligent thinking to social-emotional being, from reality to appea…
Virtual moral agency, virtual moral responsibility
Contemporary technology creates a proliferation of nonhuman artificial entities such as robots and intelligent information systems. Sometimes they are called ‘artificial agents’. But are they agents at all? And if so, should they be considered as moral agents and be held morally responsible? They do things to us in various ways, and what happens can be and has to be discussed in terms of right and wrong, good or bad. But does that make them agent…
Distributive Justice and Co-Operation in a World of Humans and Non-Humans
Robot rights? Towards a social-relational justification of moral consideration
Should we grant rights to artificially intelligent robots? Most current and near-future robots do not meet the hard criteria set by deontological and utilitarian theory. Virtue ethics can avoid this problem with its indirect approach. However, both direct and indirect arguments for moral consideration rest on ontological features of entities, an approach which incurs several problems. In response to these difficulties, this paper taps into a diff…
Emotions and Risky Technologies
Humans, Animals, and Robots
You, robot
How can we make sense of the idea of ‘personal’ or ‘social’ relations with robots? Starting from a social and phenomenological approach to human–robot relations, this paper explores how we can better understand and evaluate these relations by attending to the ways our conscious experience of the robot and the human–robot relation is mediated by language. It is argued that our talk about and to robots is not a mere representation of an objective r…
From Killer Machines to Doctrines and Swarms, or Why Ethics of Military Robotics Is not (Necessarily) About Robots
Ethical reflections on military robotics can be enriched by a better understanding of the nature and role of these technologies and by putting robotics into context in various ways. Discussing a range of ethical questions, this paper challenges the prevalent assumptions that military robotics is about military technology as a mere means to an end, about single killer machines, and about “military” developments. It recommends that ethics of roboti…
Artificial Companions
Under what conditions can robots become companions and what are the ethical issues that might arise in human-robot companionship relations? I argue that the possibility and future of robots as companions depends (among other things) on the robot s capacity to be a recipient of human empathy, and that one necessary condition for this to happen is that the robot mirrors human vulnerabilities. For the purpose of these arguments, I make a distinction…
Can we trust robots?
Can we trust robots? Responding to the literature on trust and e-trust, this paper asks if the question of trust is applicable to robots, discusses different approaches to trust, and analyses some preconditions for trust. In the course of the paper a phenomenological-social approach to trust is articulated, which provides a way of thinking about trust that puts less emphasis on individual choice and control than the contractarian-individualist ap…
Growing Moral Relations
Pervasion of what? Techno–human ecologies and their ubiquitous spirits
Are the robots coming? Is the singularity near? Will we be dominated by technology? The usual response to ethical issues raised by pervasive and ubiquitous technologies assumes a philosophical anthropology centered on existential autonomy and agency, a dualistic ontology separating humans from technology and the natural from the artificial, and a post-monotheistic dualist and creational spirituality. This paper explores an alternative, less moder…
Human Being @ Risk
The Moral Standing of Machines
Facing Animals
Environmental Skill
1. Introduction Part I: Environmental Motivation and Knowledge: Ancient and Modern Lessons from Philosophy and Psychology 2. The Moral Psychology of Environmental Sin 3. Lessons from Contemporary Psychology Part II: The Janus Face of Modern Environmentalism: Enlightenment and Romanticism 4. Enlightenment Reason and Liberation Politics 5. Romantic Feeling for Part III: Beyond, Nature, beyond Modernity, beyond Thinking: A Non-Romantic, Non-Modern A…
A Survey of Expectations About the Role of Robots in Robot-Assisted Therapy for Children with ASD
Beyond “nature”
In modernity the environment is usually perceived as "nature": either it is seen from an objectivist-technoscientific point of view, or it is experienced in subjectivist-romantic terms – both of which are entangled with how we act. This chapter considers philosophical reflection and argument to show that both modes of seeing and treating the environment present a distorted view of the basic, existential relation between humans and their environme…
Ethics of healthcare robotics
How can we best identify, understand, and deal with ethical and societal issues raised by healthcare robotics? This paper argues that next to ethical analysis, classic technology assessment, and philosophical speculation we need forms of reflection, dialogue, and experiment that come, quite literally, much closer to innovation practices and contexts of use. The authors discuss a number of ways how to achieve that. Informed by their experience wit…
Care robots and the future of ICT-mediated elderly care
Epistemology (61 obras) · Sociology (53 obras) · Philosophy (51 obras) · Computer Science (39 obras) · Political science (36 obras) · Psychology (34 obras) · Ethics and Social Impacts of AI (31 obras) · Law (30 obras) · Neuroethics, Human Enhancement, Biomedical Innovations (26 obras) · Politics (17 obras)