Arun Kumar Tripathi, Dresden University of Technology: Philosophy of Technology and Human Computer Interaction - How Embodied Users deal with Embedded Computers

Abstract

Since the human race began, human invents technology: technology invents humans. The characteristics that make us human will continue to be manifest in our relationship with technology. Shifting boundaries between computers and everyday world. The more we depend on technologies to carry out or mediate our everyday activities, the more we will need to trust than to do so. New technologies inspire new interface paradigms, while new interfaces utilizing these emerging technologies encourage their continued refinement by revealing aspects most useful in their application. Computer technology gives a new way to understand the world by virtue of having bodies. We can think of the body as a uniquely sensitive and manifold interface. The role of computer in the world has evolved from specialised computing machines to information devices that pervade our daily lives. As research in Artificial Intelligence attempts to make computers more human, some approaches to human-computer interaction are becoming analogous to human-human interaction. By attempting to emulate human conversation, natural language technologies are poised to replace traditional graphical interfaces as a more natural means of interaction. This approach, however, overlooks the embodied nature of communication, leading to serious difficulties in usability and implementation. In the seminar, I will demonstrate how integrating the multiplicity of input channels leads benefits in interactive efficiency and robustness and will also show that in trying to understand the user, multimodal systems should take into account both the user´s thoughts and emotions, the motivation of affective computing. In my seminar, I will suggest to rethink on how is the role of computer in the world to understand embodied nature of communication by dealing with embedded computers, through multimodal systems to sharing phenomenological experiences. To deal with these issues, it is argued that HCI needs to develop a philosophy of technology and embodiment, where I shall apply the philosophy of technology approaches of North American philosophers Don Ihde and Robert Rosenberger to develop a phenomenology of relations between human users, artefacts and the world where technologies are seen as inherently non-neutral.

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Rikard Harr