I am glad to share this new publication in collaboration with Marta Pérez-Verdugo (first author and main contributor to this paper). This is my first (probably the first?) serious and deep philosophical application of sensorimotor life theories of cognition to digital, and more generally technological, environments. It also brings with it ethical and political implications in the way in which digital environments constraint technopolitical autonomy, and makes a notable contribution to the connection between autonomy in moral philosophy and autonomy in enactive theorizing (thanks to the great work made by Marta). The paper is also very programmatic and foundational, for it characterizes technology and technical behaviour in enactive terms and opens the way to further developments to come. Finally, the paper illuminates the way in which we get so often captured or steered by interface design in digital platforms and how to build autonomy-enhancing digital environments.
Pérez-Verdugo, M., & Barandiaran, X. E. (2023). Personal Autonomy and (Digital) Technology: An Enactive Sensorimotor Framework. Philosophy & Technology, 36(4), 84. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-023-00683-y.
ABSTRACT: Many digital technologies, designed and controlled by intensive data-driven corporate platforms, have become ubiquitous for many of our daily activities. This has raised political and ethical concerns over how they might be threatening our personal autonomy. However, not much philosophical attention has been paid to the specific role that their hyper-designed (sensorimotor) interfaces play in this regard. In this paper, we aim to offer a novel framework that can ground personal autonomy on sensorimotor interaction and, from there, directly address how technological design affects personal autonomy. To do this, we will draw from enactive sensorimotor approaches to cognition, focusing on the central notion of habits, understood as sensorimotor schemes that, in networked relations, give rise to sensorimotor agency. Starting from sensorimotor agency as a basis for more complex forms of personal autonomy, our approach gives us grounds to analyse our relationship with technology (in general) and to distinguish between autonomy-enhancing and autonomy-diminishing technologies. We argue that, by favouring/obstructing the enactment of certain (networks of) habits over others, technologies can directly act upon our personal autonomy, locally and globally. With this in mind, we then discuss how current digital technologies are often being designed to be autonomy-diminishing (as is the case of “dark patterns” in design), and sketch some ideas on how to build more autonomy-enhancing digital technologies.
Xabier E. Barandiaran 