Phd On Preserving Human Capabilities

6 maanden geleden


Eindhoven, Nederland TU Eindhoven Voltijd

**Job description**:
Rapid advances in sensors, artificial intelligence (AI), and the Internet of Things (IoT) hold the promise of enhancing human capacities and prolonging well-being as we age. Philosophers are increasingly viewing human well-being as the exercise of various capacities, some of which significantly change during senescence. Cutting-edge augmentation technologies have the potential to replace or improve many deteriorating capabilities, enabling us to maintain physical abilities (e.g., exoskeletons) and cognitive health (e.g., brain-computer interfaces). Such technologies increase our ability to live independently for longer, while also boosting our overall quality of life. Nevertheless, technological advances of augmentation technologies simultaneously disrupt long-held normative notions about _how human capabilities are connected to the good life_ (Nussbaum 2020, 2011) and _how to view senescence _(Sen 1993). This has direct implications for the design of technologies that seek to augment our capabilities, especially when such augmentation technologies aim to replace capabilities later in life.

Scientific progress on the question of how to enhance age-dependent capabilities is hampered by a widening gap between 1) the power of STEM-based technologies to enhance a wide range of human capabilities, and 2) normative accounts of well-being, specifically ethical theories that link the ability to exercise a full range of capabilities to living well (Jacobs 2020). The PhD researcher will join an interdisciplinary team aiming to unite the practices of STEM disciplines that make augmentation _technologically possible_ with philosophical insights that shed light on which augmentation technologies are _ethically desirable_ for improving life quality. This stands to significantly improve the future design of end-of-life technologies, especially technologies that explicitly connect the exercise of human capabilities to well-being in later life.

By uniting STEM and ethical approaches to the future design of augmentation technologies, the holder of this PhD position will have the following key deliverables:

- Unpack cultural and conceptual differences to create new approaches to interdisciplinary confrontation. Potentially, share these with affiliated research programmes that also seek to do multi
- and/or trans-disciplinary research (e.g., Hybrid Intelligence, SIENNA).
- Show how a framework that emphasises preserving human capabilities & extending well-being can be useful in the ethical evaluation of other socially disruptive technologies.

**Funding & Institutional Embedding**

This PhD position is funded by the _Ethics of Socially Disruptive Technologies _(ESDiT). It will be hosted by Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e), primarily by the Human-Technology Interaction Group, but also by the Philosophy & Ethics Group. The PhD will participate in the activities of these groups, as well as the recently launched, Expertise Centre Dementia & Technology.

**The ESDiT Programme**

**Human-Technology Interaction Group**

The Human-Technology Interaction (HTI) group analyses human interactions with technology with the aim to better understand and improve the match between technology and its users. HTI combines expertise from areas of social sciences (mainly cognitive and social psychology and perception) with engineering. The group’s lab facilities offer opportunities to study virtual reality, auditory perception, gaming, lighting, and general psychological lab resources. The group’s research centers around five main areas: human-computer interaction and affective computing, decision-making and human-data interaction, social psychology and persuasion, contextual environmental psychology, and human perception and cognition. HTI takes part in multiple collaborations and multidisciplinary research. More information about HTI can be found here.

**Philosophy & Ethics Group**

TU/e’s Philosophy and Ethics (P&E) group connects philosophy and ethics to emerging technologies and innovation. Researchers in the P&E group primarily study innovative technologies and technology-related problems in detail to enable empirically informed analyses that are meaningful to philosophers, researchers across disciplines, and other societal stakeholders. To do this, the group has established close interdisciplinary collaborations with researchers from groups in the TU/e School of Innovation Sciences, as well as with mechanical engineers, climate scientists, and archaeologists, among others. The group’s expertise covers a variety of philosophical sub-disciplines, including applied ethics, normative ethics, meta-ethics, philosophy of science and technology, and epistemology. More information about P&E can be found here.

**Expertise Centre Dementia & Technology**

The ECDT collaborates with Alzheimer Nederland and TU Eindhoven, aiming to contribute to changing the approach to dementia in society. The technology developed



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