Conference Agenda

I explore how we should understand the role of technology in conceptual disruption. I will argue that technology is potentially conceptual disruptive because it can create ‘novelty’, but that the disruptive potential of technology is often not limited to a (sudden) interruption caused by classificatory uncertainty, but may evolve over time, resulting in the disruption of larger conceptual clusters or schemes.

Following Marchiori and Scharp (2024), I will understand conceptual disruption as “an interruption in the normal functioning of a concept, cluster of concepts, or conceptual scheme.” My focus will particularly be on clusters of concepts and conceptual schemes. I will argue that such clusters and schemes have three relevant characteristics when it comes to conceptual disruption. First they have a certain coverage, that is to say they may to a greater or lesser extent cover phenomena (broadly conceived) that an agent encounters in the external world. Seconds, conceptual clusters or schemes have a certain internal coherence, they may be more or less coherent. Third, they have a certain functional fit which means that they are more or less appropriate for fulfilling certain functions (like representation, causal reasoning, or moral evaluation).

I will then consider four types of novelty to which technology may give raise and consider how each of these may lead to conceptual disruption: 1) new entities (like artificial agents), new phenomena (like friendship online), 3) new options for actions and practices (like doxing) and 4) new moral problems (like climate change).

I will suggest that to understand the disruptive potential of new technology in these cases, we should not just look at how the novelty created by technology may lead classificatory uncertainty but also at more downstream disruptive effects on conceptual clusters and schemes. Initially, it may seem that the novelty created by technology only challenges the coverage of existing conceptual schemes. Moreover, it might seem relatively easy to address this challenge, either by applying existing concepts to the new phenomenon or by creating a new (more specific) concept that combines two existing concepts like for example “friendship online” or “artificial agent.” However this way of incorporating the new phenomenon in an existing conceptual scheme may lead to a decrease in the internal coherence of that conceptual scheme. For example, the notion of “artificial agent” may decrease coherence because - unlike human agents - artificial agents do not have a mind and cannot be responsible. Consequently, also the functional fit of the conceptual scheme made diminish. For example the notion of “artificial agency” may hinder rather than enable proper moral evaluation.

Reference

Marchiori, S., & Scharp, K. (2024). What is conceptual disruption? Ethics and Information Technology, 26(1), 18. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-024-09749-7

The core premise of niche construction theory is that organisms are not only shaped by but actively shape their living conditions, thereby co-determining their evolutionary fate (Lala, Odling-Smee & Feldman 2001). Over the last two decades, interest in niche construction theory has extended beyond the field of evolutionary biology. Niches of various sorts have been identified and have been studied from multiple disciplinary angles, including by scholars of technology (Schot & Geels 2007). However, the topic has remained peripheral in the philosophy of technology.

In this presentation, we investigate the promise of niche construction as a framework for studying technological changes of society, in particular of the domain of social morality, and drawing on examples of ‘intimate technologies’. We first argue that it useful to think of modified socio-moral environments as ‘moral niches’, in which particular moral norms and institutions are likely to evolve and persist. We subsequently investigate the process of ‘technomoral niche construction’ (Hopster et al. 2021). In a technomoral niche, the human-modified environment, partially constituted by technology, influences the moral development of agents who act within the niche. Drawing on historical examples, we show that technomoral niches can be stabilized by enduring institutions, conceptual systems, and material technologies, but that moral niches can also be destabilized by emerging technologies.

Our aim in fleshing out the concept of technomoral niche construction is twofold. First, we seek to arrive at a better understanding of the different roles of technologies in the construction and disruption of technomoral niches, and to identify at what scale(s) technomoral niche construction is best investigated – (a) phylogenetic, (b) sociogenetic, (c) ontogenetic, or (d) microgenetic (Coninx 2023). Second, we wish to clarify the normative dimensions of technomoral niche construction. What is the value of stable technomoral niches, and what are the risks, harms, and benefits of niche disruptions?

Literature

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Altman, A., & Mesoudi, A. (2019). Understanding agriculture within the frameworks of cumulative cultural evolution, gene-culture co-evolution, and cultural niche construction. Human Ecology 47: 483-497. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-019-00090-y

Boyd, Robert, Peter J. Richerson, and Joseph Henrich. (2011). The Cultural Niche: Why Social Learning is Essential for Human Adaptation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108: 10918–10925. doi:10.1073/pnas. 1100290108

Coninx, S. (2023). The dark side of niche construction. Philosophical Studies, 180(10), 3003-3030.

Dean, Timothy. (2014). Evolution and Moral Ecology. PhD thesis, University of New South Wales. https://doi.org/10.26190/unsworks/17194

Henrich, Joseph. (2016). The Secret of our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating our Species, and Making us Smarter. Princeton (NJ): Princeton University Press.

Henrich, Joseph, Robert Boyd, and Peter J. Richerson. (2008). Five Misunderstandings About Cultural Evolution. Human Nature 19 (2): 119–137. doi:10.1007/s12110-008-9037-1

Hopster, J.K.G., Arora, C., Blunden, C., Eriksen, C., Frank, L.E., Hermann, J.S., Klenk, M.B.O.T., O’Neill, E.R.H. and Steinert, S., (2022). Pistols, pills, pork and ploughs: the structure of technomoral revolutions. Inquiry, pp.1-33. DOI:10.1080/0020174X.2022.2090434

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Odling-Smee, J., Laland, K. N., and Feldman, M. W. (2003). Niche Construction: The Neglected Process in Evolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Richerson, Peter J., and Robert Boyd. (2005). Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution. Chicago (IL): University of Chicago Press.

Schot, J., & Geels, F. W. (2007). Niches in evolutionary theories of technical change: A critical survey of the literature. Journal of evolutionary economics, 17, 605-622.

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Smyth, N. (2020). A genealogy of emancipatory values. Inquiry, 1-30.

After the age of grand narratives, an age of “grand challenges” appeared to dawn in EU’s rhetoric. This was quickly replaced by an age of “wicked problems,” such as climate change, immigration and socio-economic inequality. Such problems are not merely complex or pernicious, they are world-disruptive. Moreover, according to major international actors such the EU, countering the disruption is directly premised on the capacity to innovate. Indeed, technologies such as AI, with the greatest protentional for disruption are seen as the last line of defence against disruption.

In order to appraise this seeming contradiction, the talk begins by tracing the conceptual limits and critiquing the limitations of the notion of disruptive innovation. Sprang in the mid-90s from Clayton Christensen’s monograph The Innovator’s Dilemma, disruption theory argued that the gradual development of certain technologies primes established companies to produce increasingly more refined and capable products, which paradoxically leads to their eventual demise. What was crucial in this theory from the outset is that innovation was understood in technical terms, while disruption was understood in economic terms. This narrow configuration became increasingly apparent as the theory was popularised and adopted in fields outside business and management theory. Its instigators attempted to reclaim the theory as a rigorous analytical tool, by clarifying strict criteria that would disqualify a service such as Über as a disruptive innovation, even if the general consensus—among civilians, taxi-drivers and legislators—saw Über as undeniably disruptive. A more comprehensive theory of disruptive innovation was needed.

Instead of looking at specific attempts to expand the original scope of disruptive innovation, the talk turns in the second part, to thematise disruption at the most expansive scale, that is, the world. The world is understood here not as the totality of beings, or a place that contains this totality, but as the horizon of meaning. Drawing on the interventions of Jean-Luc Nancy on the problem of the world in the twenty-first century, the talk identifies “world-disruption” in three senses: the first two consist in a certain deficit, as the world can no longer be experienced as a “well-composed ensemble,” that is, a “cosmos”; moreover, the world can no longer be ordered either at the “universal” or the local “natural” or “cultural” levels. The third sense amounts to the opposite, albeit concurrent, tendency of an excessive, overwhelming proliferation of “worlds.” Having explicated this diagnosis, the talk examines the role Nancy attributes to technology (“ecotechnics”) in effectuating this triple disruption, aiming to offer an alternate way of understanding the novum at the heart of innovation.