Embed Size (px)
Citation preview
ETHICOMP
I am a Person
David Kreps & Oliver Burmeister
Turin, Italy, June 2017
A review of value
sensitive design for
cognitive declines of
ageing, interpreted
through the lens of
personhood
Agenda
✤ Physical Personhood / Social Personhood
✤ Age Related Cognitive Decline
✤ Value Sensitive Design (VSD) - survey of the literature
✤ Power and technology
✤ Power, technology, personhood, and VSD
Physical Personhood
✤ Human individuals are both radically contingent, and unique
✤ individual cells are continually feeding, growing, maturing, dying off, being replaced
✤ Red blood cells live for about four months White blood cells live about twelve months Skin cells live for about two or three weeks Colon cells die off after about four daysBrain cells typically last an entire lifetime
✤ Our physicality is largely fluid – a collection of temporarily captured solids
✤ YET our (constantly self-replicating) fingerprints, the patterns of our irises, and a host of other molecular and genetic markers – especially our fundamental DNA -are unique to each of us NIAID
Dissipative StructuresRadically contingent bodies
✤ The spiral is a dissipative structure.
✤ The structure is not dependent upon its contents, and exists only as they pass through it.
✤ Such dissipative structures, for environmental biologists, are the very stuff of life, visible in both the biology and behaviour of all living systems.
✤ The human individual is physically –biologically - a dissipative structure, with only a very few parts lasting its (one) entire lifetime.
Dave S
hea
✤ Languages, values, knowledge, skills are all absorbed, passed on, through human communication and socialisation: we are radically social beings.
✤ Social personhood is a dissipative structure, composed of the many influences we absorb and extend
✤ Foucault: disciplinarity and techniques of the self
✤ Uniqueness and creativity are found in our own combinations and fusions of contemporary common elements of experience, knowledge, and skill
✤ In exercising our free will we shape these in a way that distinguishes us from all others: we are unique
Social PersonhoodRadically contingent selves
Georgie Pauwels
Mind-Body-AgeingLibet, Bergson, and the processes of aging
✤ Bergson: our psychical life, while bound to its motor accompaniment, is not governed by it
✤ Benjamin Libet: the “determinist materialist view” that would reduce us to ‘a pack of neurons’ “is a belief system; it is not a scientific theory that has been verified by direct tests.” On the contrary, “the nonphysical nature of subjective awareness, including the feelings of spirituality, creativity, conscious will, and imagination, is not describable or explainable directly by the physical evidence alone”.
✤ Ageing:
✤ Self-renewal process is not fixed and its efficiency changes with age
✤ Apoptosis (cells undergo programmed cell death) begins to accelerate, as we grow older
✤ Senescence – “the state where cells have irreversibly lost their proliferation ability” and become resistant to apoptosis.
✤ Molecular damage in cells begins to proliferate, too; many cells try to go on undertaking their function longer than they were meant to, unable to self-renew; problems mount up
https://thehumanevolutionblog.com/2015/01/07/is-violence-what-made-humans-smarter-than-other-animals/
Age related cognitive declineThe occlusion of social personhood
✤ Physical motor accompaniment to our mental and emotional lives begins to deteriorate
✤ Social personhood:
✤ A separate non-physical reality made up of our relationships, does not itself deteriorate
✤ It is not contained in or made up of the physical cells whose life-processes are coming to an end
✤ Instead it becomes harder to reach, shining in moments of lucidity through the relationships those with cognitive decline maintain with their relatives and carers.
Neil Moralee
Assistive technologiesand Value Sensitive Design
✤ Assistive technologies can be designed in one of two ways:
✤ to support the physical functioning of bodies whose self-renewal mechanisms are almost exhausted;
✤ or to support the continuing relationships and social personhood of the individual
✤ VSD employs an iterative methodology integrating conceptual, empirical, and technical investigations.
✤ Human Values (not designer values) are sought from both direct and indirect stakeholders.
✤ VSD seeks to explicitly support these human values by the technology
✤ When applied to assistive technologies for age-related cognitive decline, VSD must focus upon supporting relationships, and upon respecting the personhood of those at the end of their physical lives. The question we have, then, is: does it?
✤ 27 point PRISMA protocol employed for review
✤ 15 of 21,500 in European Scopus and 5 of 28,000 in Web of Science
✤ “value sensitive design” OR "stakeholder values" OR "human values"AND dementia OR cog* AND ageing OR aging OR "older people" or "older adults"
✤ 3 non-English and 3 non-relevant articles discarded, left 10 articles, plus 5 on VSD and care robots relevant to age-related decline.
✤ Total 15 articles for further investigation
The literature survey: searchVSD and assistive technologies for cognitive decline
✤ The focus of VSD to date has been on physically supportive technology
✤ FINDINGS: Assistive technologies are designed to support the physical functioning of bodies whose self-renewal mechanisms are almost exhausted –rather than supporting the continuing relationships and social personhood of the individual whose motor accompaniment is reaching its natural end.
✤ Why? : Our contention is that issues of power in the understanding and application of technology are at play, and that a better understanding of such issues is required if VSD is to overcome this deficit.
Survey resultsVSD and assistive technologies for cognitive decline
PRLOG
✤ Technologies, including assistive technologies, are always pregnant with power relations.
✤ VSD must understand power, and operate within a framework that is sensitive to its workings.
✤ The exercise of power for the designer of technological artefacts should always be as intentional as possible, rather than intuitive or unconscious, in order best to steer clear of the potential traps of the politics of artefacts
✤ Awareness of power relations amongst practitioners of VSD is crucial to reaching the best compromise if VSD is to achieve any progress towards “the realization of a society in which technology is a force for empowerment rather than for domination”
Power and technologyVSD and assistive technologies for cognitive decline
Evine
Power technology and Personhood in VSDA conceptual framework
Contact
✤ Dr David Kreps
✤ http://david.kreps.org
✤ Dr Oliver Burmeister
✤ Cover photo by Giorgio Grande
