Persuasive Technologies 2.0

Matthew Dennis (Eindhoven University of Technology)

Talk summary:

Persuasive technologies threaten our digital well-being. They do so by undermining our ability to focus, deliberate, and act autonomously, which ethicists view as necessary conditions for leading a flourishing life. Value-sensitive designers (VSD) have responded to these concerns by suggesting that online technologies should be designed in ways that nudge us towards a better online behaviour.Repurposing persuasive technologies for digital well-being appears promising, but it is fraught with ethical challenges. Those wishing to enlist persuasive technologies to promote better digital well-being must design in ways that do not violate key values (e.g., autonomy, responsibility, self-determination) or weaken paradigmatic human faculties (e.g., focus, deliberation, choice). This talk will show how VSD has can help tech companies reimagine digital well-being in a way that deals with the challenges of persuasive technologies.    

Bio:

Matthew J. Dennis is an assistant professor in ethics of technology at TU Eindhoven. He specialises in the ethics of artificial intelligence, algorithmic fairness, and the future of work. His recent publications focus on how we can live well with emerging technologies from an intercultural perspective. He was previously a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Research Fellow at TU Delft (2019–21) and an Early Career Innovation Fellow at University of Warwick (2019). He has a Joint Monash-Warwick PhD (2019).