Call for Abstracts:
“Ethics of Imagination in the Age of Technology”
A panel at the 10th STS Italia Conference
June 11-13, 2025
Milan, Italy
Panel: https://stsitalia.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/72.Ethics-of-Imagination-in-the-Age-of-Technology-ID_115.pdf
STS Italia: https://stsitalia.org/call-for-abstracts/
Deadline for submissions: February 3, 2025
I am delighted to announce the Call for Abstracts for the panel “Ethics of Imagination in the Age of Technology” to be held at the 10th STS Italia Conference — “Technoscience for Good: Designing, Caring and Reconfiguring” — which will take place on 11–13 June 2025 at the Politecnico di Milano, Milan (Italy).
Panel proposal:
Einstein once said that imagination is more important than knowledge; the latter is limited, whereas the former is boundless; it encircles the world. Imagination ferries us beyond the present into newer terrains of inventions, art, poetry, literature, technology, etc. But what does it mean to ‘imagine’ in the age of technology, considering we are no longer bound within the present and actual? What are the ethical implications associated with imagination in this world? How do we morally evaluate the imaginations we engage in? Historically, imagination has enjoyed an amoral status. Yet, recently, there has been a rising interest in the ethics of imagination, where, for example, it is largely accepted among varied cultures that fantasizing about torturing children is morally wrong. By virtue of technology, this debate has justifiably become more complicated. For example, ethical concerns in cyberspace, when a woman was sexually abused in a virtual reality game two years ago, or deepfakes, when a woman discovered her face had been digitally edited onto images of women in sexually explicit situations in 2023. Technology provides a platform to represent our imagination with no physical actions involved, lowering moral evaluation’s stakes.
Here is a list of questions that can be addressed, although not exhaustive:
- What criteria should we use to assess the creativity of AI systems? Is creativity a purely human attribute, or can machines also possess it?
- By outsourcing imagination and creation to machines, do we risk diminishing the value of human artistic expression or the labor of human creators?
- How do deepfakes and other forms of synthetic media challenge the line between reality and fiction? What ethical considerations arise from the creation and distribution of realistic but fabricated content?
- How do we deal with this moral problem that has yet to be recognized as a problem?
- Does technology benefit our flow of imagination or somehow restrict or malign it, and in what ways?
- What are our moral obligations to maneuver this new unknown territory before things get too out of hand?
More details about the conference- https://stsitalia.org/call-for-abstracts/#theme
SUBMISSION DETAILS:
Submit your abstract here: https://stsitalia.org/submission-2025/
Deadline for abstract submission: 3 February 2025
Notification of acceptance: 28 February 2025.
Please contact me if you have questions or concerns at spaul5@ucsc.edu
I look forward to receiving your submissions!
Regards,
Somreeta Paul
Department of Philosophy,
University of California, Santa Cruz
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