How to talk about technology: A discussion based on Moved by Machines (Rout

Research Masterclass and Workshop Program

10am introductions: participants will introduce themselves and their research

11:30am Prof Coeckelbergh will provide an overview of his work on metaphor, performance and technology.

12:30pm Lunch

1:30pm Workshop

3pm Close

Participants are encouraged to read Prof Coeckelbergh's work before the event. If you have time, please nominate a section to read in this Google Doc. These books are available electronically from the University of Sydney library.

This Research Masterclass will discuss the relation between language and technology and, in particular, which vocabularies and metaphors we can and should (not) use to talk about technology. Researchers from humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and engineering all welcome, since the discussion about language and metaphors links up to one of the more general challenges of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research: how to find a common language?

To participate in this masterclass attendees must submit a paragraph about their research to sssharc.research@sydney.edu.au by Friday 29 November.

Given the rapid development of new technologies such as smart devices, robots, and artificial intelligence and their impact on the lives of people and on society, it is important and urgent to construct conceptual frameworks that help us to understand and evaluate them. Often people who work in technology development think about technology only in internal, technical terms, and this approach to technology is communicated (sometimes miscommunicated) to the public. But there are more ways of trying to understand technology, offered by the humanities and social sciences. Furthermore, engineers are often unaware of the role of language as a tool and technology, next to other techonlogies.

The book Moved by Machines (Routledge) is part of my efforts to think more explicitly about the language we use to talk about technology.  Benefiting from tendencies towards a performative turn in the humanities and social sciences, drawing on thinking about the performing arts, and responding to gaps in contemporary artefact-oriented philosophy of technology, the book moves thinking about technology forward by using performance as a metaphor to understand and evaluate what we do with technology and what technology does with us. Metaphors from practices such as dance, theatre, music, and stage magic are used as interfaces to bring in various theories that are not usually employed in philosophy of technology. The result is a performance-oriented conceptual framework for a thinking about technology which, liberated from (1) merely technical and scientific vocabulary from engineering and the natural sciences and (2) the static, vision-centred, and dualistic metaphors offered by traditional philosophy, can do more justice to the phenomenology of our daily embodied, social, kinetic, temporal, and narrative performances with technology, our technoperformances.

Coeckelbergh, M. (2019). Moved by machines : performance metaphors and philosophy of technology. New York: Routledge. (available electronically through the University of Sydney library).

Bio

Prof Mark Coeckelbergh is Professor of Philosophy of Media and Technology at the Department of Philosophy of the University of Vienna and President of the Society for Philosophy and Technology. He also has an affiliation as Professor of Technology and Social Responsibility at De Montfort University in Leicester, UK. He is the author of over ten books, including Growing Moral Relations (2012), Human Being @ Risk (2013), Environmental Skill (2015), Money Machines (2015), New Romantic Cyborgs (2017) and Moved by Machines: Performance Metaphors and Philosophy of Technology (2019). He has also written many articles. He is best known for his work in philosophy of technology, robotics and ethics of robotics and artificial intelligence (AI). 

Acknowledgments

The visit of Professor Coeckelbergh is supported by the Sydney Social Sciences and Humanities Advanced Research Centre, The Sydney Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Systems and the Sociotechnical futures lab at the University of Sydney. 

This event is free, but numbers are limited, so registration before December 1 is essential.

Image: https://www.routledge.com/Moved-by-Machines-Performance-Metaphors-and-Philosophy-of-Technology/Coeckelbergh/p/book/9780367245573