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As AI algorithms advance and produce surprising outputs, the question of imagination arises. Can we classify their output as imaginative? And what is their effect on human imagination? Apparently, algorithms follow Kant’s explanations on human imagination, thereby pushing us to update our understanding of imagination by taking into account the co-shaping between humans and their technologies. Such a new understating is offered in this article based on the theories of Don Ihde and Bernard Stiegler. With Ihde, imagination is conceived as tightly linked to perception. Imagination evolves from the modernist task of seeking new points-of-view to a new mode in which technologies present imaginative layers of information on top of reality. With Stiegler, imagination is regarded as tightly linked to memory. He demonstrates how imagination complements memory, serves as a condition to memory/technology and at the same time how imagination itself is conditioned by memory/technology. In this article I develop a new synthesis: imagination as composed of perception and memory. This is the foundation of my layered model of digital imagination. In this model, the task of AI algorithms is the filling in of the layers with data. By producing endless possibilities, these technologies “automate” the Kantian “free play” of imagination, allowing us to examine more options and focus on the best of them. The model reserves the production of meaning to humans. Our role as humans is to generate (or reveal) meaning to the link(s) between layers and establish new layers.

As part of the Special Section: Technology & Pandemic, this article examines the experience of teaching and learning via Zoom I examine how technologies mediate the learning process with the postphenomenological notions of embodiment and hermeneutic relations This section serves as a basis for understanding the transformation of that process into online learning The next section is named “the Zoom-bie”—a combination of the words Zoom and zombie The figure of the Zoom-bie provides me a way to critically review the new practices experienced in the spring semester of 2020 After analyzing the variations of the learning process with a fresh look at embodiment and hermeneutic relations, the last section titled “the digital classroom” examines this transformation from an alternative point-of-view, that of the classroom as a technology-saturated background © 2021 Philosophy Documentation Center All rights reserved

The rise of AI-based systems has been accompanied by the belief that these systems are impartial and do not suffer from the biases that humans and older technologies express. It becomes evident, however, that gender and racial biases exist in some AI algorithms. The question is where the bias is rooted—in the training dataset or in the algorithm? Is it a linguistic issue or a broader sociological current? Works in feminist philosophy of technology and behavioral economics reveal the gender bias in AI technologies as a multi-faceted phenomenon, and the linguistic explanation as too narrow. The next step moves from the linguistic aspects to the relational ones, with postphenomenology. One of the analytical tools of this theory is the “I-technology-world” formula that models our relations with technologies, and through them—with the world. Realizing that AI technologies give rise to new types of relations in which the technology has an “enhanced technological intentionality”, a new formula is suggested: “I-algorithm-dataset.” In the third part of the article, four types of solutions to the gender bias in AI are reviewed: ignoring any reference to gender, revealing the considerations that led the algorithm to decide, designing algorithms that are not biased, or lastly, involving humans in the process. In order to avoid gender bias, we can recall a feminist basic understanding—visibility matters. Users and developers should be aware of the possibility of gender and racial biases, and try to avoid them, bypass them, or exterminates them altogether.

The concept of multistability is pertinent today in our technology-intensive world for its ability to indicate how a given technology has different meanings to different people at different times. In this chapter I claim that multistability should be subjected to its own principles, and hence it should acquire the plural form of multistabilities. The various usages and implementations of the notion are placed along an axis according to the number of stabilities and the goals of the analysis. When scientists study a multistable phenomenon, they collect data from several sources to reach one “truth.” This is the “modern scientific” region. Designers and other material culture specialists produce a high number of stabilities. This is the “modern evolutionary” region, inspired by Darwinian evolution. It is applicable to fashion items, cellphones models and street benches, to name a few. Lastly, innovators—may they be engineers, designers, or artists—look for numerous stabilities of a given phenomenon, whose collection may yield a new meta-stability. This is the “postmodern” region. The last region is applicable to sustainability, urging us to exceed the “climate change” and “global warming” phrases, and take into account other aspects such as deforestation, acidification of the oceans, etc.

The Onlife Manifesto rightfully points to the emergence of new forms of subjectivity in the digital age and how ICT calls for the re-distribution of tasks and responsibilities between humans and their technologies. However, attention is still conceived in the Manifesto in modernist terms, as a problem of distraction. Within the terminology of attention economy, the Manifesto is critical about the abuse of traditional forms of attention, but does not make the next step to develop an alternative. In this chapter, I elaborate on the notion of attention and think of its new form in the digital age. A genealogy of the notion shows how attention reflects the dominant technologies of a period. In the age of the printed book, attention meant focusing on one activity at a time, and the background had to be silent and unnoticeable. In the age of radio and television, when stations and channels were switched with a single button, attention was still focused on a single item but for shorter periods of time. Today, in the age of multi-processor computers and cell phones, attention is distributed among tasks. In its distributed form, attention can provide a subversive answer to the attention economy that requires our undivided attention.

This commentary is an attempt to rethink the ethics of taking care in posthumanist times. It is an effort to combine ethics, posthumanism and psychological theories. I examine how the psychological notion of long-term well-being can serve as an ethical yardstick and how it can be relevant to non-humans.

Why does a cell phone have a screen? From televisions and cell phones to refrigerators, many contemporary technologies come with a screen. The article aims at answering this question by employing Emmanuel Levinas’ notions of the Other and the face. This article also engages with Don Ihde’s conceptualization of alterity relations, in which the technological acts as quasi-other with which we maintain relations. If technology is a quasi-other, then, I claim, the screen is the quasi-face. By exploring Levinas’ ontology, specifically what can be identified as his tool analysis, as well as his notion of the face, a new understanding of contemporary technologies can be extracted. Some of these technologies hardly fit into the Heideggerian notion of the hand as the main interface to artifacts. Instead they require the face. Levinas’ notion of the face is analyzed from an ontological perspective and developed in conjunction with the screen. As the screen serves as a quasi-face, it enables the construction of quasi-other technological artifacts.

Attention has been addressed either as a distinction of a figure from background or as a searchlight scanning of a surface. In both ways, attention is limited to a single object. The aim of this article is to suggest a platform for an interpretation of multi-attention, that is, attention based on a multiplicity of objects and spaces. The article describes how attention can be given to more than one object, based on the experiences of pilots, parents and car drivers.

Today's navigation is different, with no paper map or compass. Instead we use a cellphone that has a built-in GPS. Such a cellphone is also equipped with an embedded camera that can read signs in various languages and barcodes that most humans cannot decipher. Combined, the GPS and the camera participate in the production and exercise of augmented reality, where reality is presented with layers of information which are accessible only through technological mediation. Currently such mediation is enabled by the cellphone, thereby providing novel dimensions to our experience of mobility. Consequently it produces innovative ways of navigation and a new sensation of reality.

The links between a Personal Health Record (PHR) and an Electronic Health Record (EHR) have influences beyond the technical tethering. It should involve an analysis of the relations between users, healthcare professionals and technology. In order to provide fresh perspectives, the postphenomenological relations of embodiment, hermeneutic and alterity are analyzed and developed into augmented embodiment and quasi-doctor terminology.