At Open Belgium 2019 today Daniel Leufer gave an interesting session on bringing philosophy and technology closer together. He presented the Open Philosophy Network, as an attempt to bring philosophy questions into tech discussions while preventing a) the overly abstract work going on in academia, b) not having all stakeholders at the table in an equal setting. He aims at local gatherings and events. Such as a book reading group, on Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Or tech-ethics round table discussions where there isn’t a panel of experts that gets interviewed but where philosophers, technologists and people who use the technology are all part of the discussion.

This resonated with me at various levels. One level is that I recognise a strong interest in naive explorations of ethical questions around technology. For instance at our Smart Stuff That Matters unconference last summer, in various conversations ethical discussions emerged naturally from the actual context of the session and the event.
Another is that, unlike some of the academic efforts I know, the step towards practical applicability is expected and needed sooner by many. In the end it all has to inform actions and choices in the here and now, even when nobody expects definitive answers. It is also why I myself dislike how many ethical discussions pretending to be action oriented are primarily connected to future or emergent technologies, not to current technology choices. Then it’s just a fig leaf for inaction, and removing agency. I’m more a pragmatist, and am interested in what achieves actual improvements in the here and now, and what increases agency.
Thirdly I also felt that there are many more connections to make in terms of open session formats, such as Open Space, knowledge cafés, blogwalks, and barcamps, and indeed the living room experience of our birthday unconferences. I’ve organised many of those, and I feel the need to revisit those experiences and think about how to deploy them for something like this.This also applies to formulating a slightly more structured approach to assist groups in organisations with naive ethical explorations.

The point of ethics is not to provide definitive answers, but to prevent us using terrible answers

I hope to interact a bit more with Daniel Leufer in the near future.

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