11Research area
Existentialism
Selfhood as a task rather than a fact — and what technologies do to the task.
The existentialist tradition — Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Beauvoir — treated the self not as a thing one has but as a task one undertakes, under conditions one did not choose. I find this vocabulary unusually useful for thinking about technologies designed to anticipate, recommend and decide on our behalf.
The question is not whether such systems are useful (they obviously are) but what they do to the task: whether a choice that has been made easy is still, in the relevant sense, mine. Beauvoir’s freedom, exercised under and against conditions rather than in their absence, is the natural place to start.