Conference Agenda

Alasdair MacIntyre's actualization of Aristotelian ethics provides a case for understanding human flourishment as embedded in the context of human practices where existing rules, examples, and patterns of excellence guide achieving the goods internal to a practice. Notwithstanding, MacIntyre didn't provide a rationale for analysing the transformation and even destruction of practices that technology triggers and how some of its contextual skills and virtues might become outdated in the process. On the other hand, Shannon Vallor’s approach builds on the interface between technology and virtues and considers how even moral deskilling can occur on various occasions. This is especially relevant for today as most human activities, tasks, jobs, and professions are incurring an increased digital process where skills and the self are transformed according to algorithms. The pace of technological progress can bring epistemic and moral disruption to practices, erasing or disguising the availability of relevant opportunities and situational affordances for acting and forming moral habits and practical reasoning (phronesis). There is nevertheless the potential for new emergent technologies to enable moral reskilling or upskilling processes.

In this presentation, I will argue that professional cycling deserves attention for these matters. Procycling can be understood as a practice where virtues and technology have always interacted to shape what it means to flourish as a rider. First, one must understand the evolution of professional cycling as tightly coupled to technology and how it has been transforming the sport and rider’s techno-moral skills. Procycling encompasses a wide range of race styles and disciplines: the skills required to win a race depend not only on individual qualities but also on controllable and incontrollable factors like the nature of the parcourse, weather conditions, and race dynamics. Undoubtedly, being genetically gifted plays a role in being a good rider. Still, virtues that support riders achieving the internal goods of racing play a decisive role in delivering good performances: courage, patience, self-control, and fortitude are pivotal techno-moral skills that athletes need to cultivate to endure the hardships of a rigorous training regimen or the discipline to return after setbacks like crashes.

The radio, introduced in the 90s, is a case in point of how riders need to adapt their skills and judgments to excel in a new technomoral environment. However, like in many other sports, procycling has been lately subjected to increasing scientific and technological approaches. Performance, nutrition, training, and resting have capsized to more AI and data-driven methods, where biometrics like watts/kg, calories, heart rate monitors, and VO2 max are the determining factors for gauging capabilities, giving insight into a rider's potential. What is now considered the image of a «good rider» is almost tantamount to the performance of a quantified self: «my numbers have never been better» is a usual mantra. While riders of old had a hermeneutical skill of self-interpreting bodily sensations and feelings - «racing on instinct» - and reading the race situation to assess their chances for attacking, nowadays numbers ultimately dictate outcomes that were once dependent on moral skills.

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is rapidly changing the creative industries and displacing the role of creative professionals. This has captured the attention of researchers from a wide range of disciplines, especially those investigating the future of creative work (Manovich 2024). GenAI can radically expand what creatives can do, speed up their activities, eliminate boring tasks, and make specialist skills otiose. Precisely because of the astonishing abilities of this technology, many creatives view it with a mix of alarm and scepticism because GenAI threatens to make the most distinctive part of their vocation redundant. These concerns are important. GenAI has only just started to change the creative industries, and the consequences of deploying it will fundamentally restructure creative work as we know it. Nevertheless, job and industry disruption are not the only reasons to be wary. Creative machines may adversely affect the well-being of creative professionals, as well as others who do creative work. This creates a new ethical challenge.

The connection between exercising one’s creativity and one’s well-being is often made in anecdotal contexts. Many creative activities (dancing, singing, life drawing, pottery classes) are explicitly promoted as ways to pursue self-care and enhance our well-being. There is empirical support for this link too. Recently, a comprehensive meta-analysis found a strong correlation of (r =.14) between well-being and what the authors call ‘everyday creativity’ (Acar et al. 2020). Furthermore, in many professions (not just creative ones), workers vociferously report that they value and enjoy the creative part of their job most (Deuze 2025). This requires us to ask: How does outsourcing our creative capacities to creative machines, such as GenAI, affect our well-being? What happens to our capacity to enjoy work when creative machines can perform many creative tasks better than we can ourselves?

This presentation will show how philosophical insights into how creativity and well-being are connected can illuminate the extent to which creative machines are useful in creative life. I will begin by examining the empirical literature that claims there is a robust connection between creativity and well-being. I will then show that we can understand this connection in three ways, which map onto three distinctions in the philosophical literature about well-being (hedonist, desire satisfaction, objective list). My analysis will prepare for an extended discussion of the role of creative machines in the good life, focusing on the creative tasks that GenAI cannot do. Finally, I will identify the ethical dangers of outsourcing creative tasks to GenAI by exploring Joanna Maciejewska’s viral slogan: ‘I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so I can do my art and writing. Not for AI to do my art and writing, so I can do my laundry and dishes’ (Maciejewska 2024). The slogan garnered 3.2M views on X, and resonated with creative professionals across the world.

Technology is changing human life in every possible way. However, bearing a child came under its influence only in the 20th century. The development of reproductive technologies and their promotion paved the way for the separation of motherhood from bearing children, which began to be understood as a technical process. While this has been studied for birth-control technologies as well as incubators, this analysis concerns the representation of pregnancy in computer games which reflect people's beliefs and desires. These games address the desire to ignore or reduce the process of bearing a child, both on the part of the creators of the game and the players. Despite the fact that carrying a baby until birth outside the body of a future mother becomes possible due to progress in the field of biomedical technologies justification for this phenomenon is largely due to the increasing virtuality of existence - the increasing digitalization of all aspects of life, including the most intimate ones, makes life more like a video game. The EctoLife project, presented in 2022, combines the latest reproductive and digital technologies, preparing society to accept virtual game pregnancy, when a baby can be ordered online, a doctor will take your cells and the "child creation" technology will be launched in an artificial capsule in a special factory (or in an apartment). Virtual pregnancy is the expectation of the birth of a child as in a game, where the character is not subject to any obligations or restrictions, just need to wait a while and the child will appear. At the same time, if desired, you can install a special mod that allows to look at the unborn child, send greetings or music. In a digital society, capacities for monitoring and control increase, but there also new ways of representing the future-baby which occupies a strictly defined place in life, like a capsule in the corner of a room, or in smartphone application, which you can turn to when there is a desire to remember the unborn baby. The technologization of intimate processes of human life is accompanied by logical arguments and quantitative research, while the arguments against are based on old-fashioned common sense and emotional arguments.