LFU:online

• Ability to develop an independent judgement with regard to technical innovations.
• Ability to engage in a mature manner with technical artefacts in public, professional and private life..
• Ability to develop innovative perspectives on as yet untapped potentials of digital technologies.
• Critically assess the political implications of the digital transformation.  

Starting from a critical discussion of the phenomenon of transhumanism, this lecture will first explore the question to what extent we have always been techno-organic hybrids (cyborgs). At the same time, it will discuss the prehistory of popular sci-fi narratives, which reduce human beings to their brain functions, thereby charging the function of one (integrating) organ with magical significance. In our search for a way out of this magical way of thinking, the discovery that intelligence is not detachable from milieu-specific forms of bodily experience, will prove to be decisive. Against this background, four questions will emerge as crucial for the future: 

1. To what extent is the evolution of our pre-scientific and scientific intelligence always shaped by culturally diversified forms of life?
2. To what extent do digital technologies have the character of power technologies that can put our lived intelligence and our freedom at risk?
3. To what extent can the dynamic of these power-technologies be counteracted by spiritual technologies of self that make us sensitive to the value-saturated features of our bodily existence?
4. To what extent can digital technologies be improved via new forms of value-based IT design that take the value-sensitive features of our lived intelligence seriously?

In connection with this discussion, we will also address the question to what extent the digital technologies of monopoly corporations such as Google, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft put our democracies at risk, and to what extent it might be possible to control them by democratic means.  

This course will have the character of an interactive face-to-face course. Active participation will be an important part of the grade in addition to the assessment of the oral examination. Each student is expected to prepare the respective lecture unit by reading the corresponding primary text and to send at least one, at most two questions to me by email 24 hours prior to the lecture.

Oral examination.

General information on exams, dates and sign-on at the department:  https://www.uibk.ac.at/systheol/lehre/pruefungen.html.en.

Johannes Hoff, Verteidigung des Heiligen. Anthropologie der Digitalen Transformation (Freiburg - Basel - Wien: Herder 2021).

Sarah Spiekermann, Digitale Ethik. Ein Wertesystem für das 21. Jahrhundert (München: Droemer 2019).

Paul Nemitz; Matthias Pfeffer, Prinzip Mensch. Macht, Freiheit und Demokratie im Zeitalter der Künstlichen Intelligenz (Bonn: Dietz 2020).

None.