FRIAS Colloquium - Philipp Höfele

Nature Orientation of Technology: The Example of a Sustainable Artificial Intelligence

In the face of the so-called 'Great Acceleration', i.e. the exponential increase in, for example, greenhouse gas emissions, species extinction or the production of microplastics, the call for technological solutions is growing louder. This raises the question of how technology can contribute to sustainable development. One solution is to call for new emerging technologies to be more nature-oriented. Using artificial intelligence as an example, this talk will show how this orientation of technology towards nature is already being pursued today and how it can be formulated as an ethical demand and task for future technological development.

The idea of nature-oriented technologies is not new and can be found early on in philosophical reflections on technology. However, it is only in the present day that it has become extremely important, firstly because of the technical possibilities of imitation, especially in the fields of biomimetics and artificial intelligence, and secondly because of the need for sustainable solutions. Today's technological orientation towards nature often goes hand in hand with normative-ethical assumptions, namely that these technologies offer 'better' solutions than 'traditional' technologies. But this is not automatic. Not every orientation towards plant, animal or human nature ensures that a technology is 'better' in terms of sustainability or ethical harmlessness. The talk therefore aims to identify the basic conditions for a concept of normative orientation towards nature, using artificial intelligence as an example.