Free the Text! A Texture-Turn in Philosophy of Technology.

Abstract

This chapter builds on the philosophy of Ricœur to improve our understanding of intelligent systems or ‘learning technology’. These systems show some sort of technical autonomy, especially the capability of machine learning, and an unprecedented range of control. This results in a characteristic withdrawal of interfaces between human acting and system processing. Technology is a prominent aspect of the stories of our lives, and a basic condition of what these stories attempt to convey. With learning technologies, however, it seems like technologies aim to make sense of us.

The chapter explores a hypothesis with problematising intent: in the special case of emerging learning technology, a reversed hermeneutic relation appears (in contrast to Don Ihde’s hermeneutic human-technology-world relation), in which people are subjected to technologically mediated interpretation. The (big) data shadows of the individuals can be grasped as text in Ricœur’s sense. Thus, learning systems (or their operators/ customers via them) infer information of the individuals from their data traces. This leads to an almost Kappian turn: With Ricœur “we understand ourselves only by the long detour of the signs of humanity deposited in cultural works”; learning systems take data as such signs and configurations (profiles, transformation of interfaces, information and acting options) can be seen (beyond Ricœur) as such cultural works. Thus, this technology contributes to shape the prefiguration of people in social contexts and because of such technological mediation, we increasingly or even predominantly encounter others in a technologically prefigured way (human resource departments or dating app users for instance). This article will analogize Ricœur’s thoughts on understanding text and ourselves via text as cultural works with data and learning systems. This analogy will then make the hypothesis of a reversed hermeneutic human-technology relation plausible (with and beyond Ihde) and lead to a supposed self-reflection via the “cultural works” of smart systems (with and beyond Kapp). This reflection will then be criticized as not accurate, but nonetheless broadly influential in today’s lifeworld; such a belief exposes people to manipulation, this article’s examination against the backdrop of Ricœur’s thoughts offers means to counter this sophisticated cunning.