Call for Participation:

Uppsala-Vienna AI Colloquium — Julian Hauser: “AI am I: Personal Assistants and the Self”
May 30, 2025
Online via Zoom
https://listserv.liv.ac.uk/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind2505&L=PHILOS-L&P=R44718

The Uppsala Vienna AI Colloquium is a series of online colloquium-style talks focused on philosophical issues surrounding AI technology. Each talk will address a specific issue of relevance to AI systems (e.g., intelligence, agency, responsibility, etc.) and will be delivered by an expert with a research background on the topic. The intended audience of the talks are philosophically informed individuals with an interest in the philosophy of artificial intelligence. More details about the Uppsala Vienna AI Colloquium are available at: https://uv-colloquium.com/

This month’s talk will be delivered on 30 May at 17:30 (Central European Time) by:

Julian Hauser
Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Barcelona
https://julianhauser.com/

The title and abstract of the talk as below: 

Title: AI am I: Personal assistants and the self

Abstract: The integration of AI personal assistants into our daily lives promises to radically transform how we experience and represent ourselves. While technology’s ability to extend human agency has been widely discussed, AI assistants introduce a novel phenomenon: they can be simultaneously experienced as part of the self and as an other with whom we converse. Through an analysis of a near-future scenario involving an AI personal assistant, I show how these technologies can become transparently integrated into our perception and action, contribute to self-knowledge, and help us shape ourselves into who we want to be. At each stage, we encounter a peculiar duality: the AI assistant functions both as equipment that disappears from conscious awareness (becoming part of the pre-reflective sense of self) and as an interlocutor who provides an ‘insider’s outsider perspective’ on who we are. Rather than seeing this as undermining selfhood, I argue that this novel form of self-relation -— which I call the ‘self-as-other’ – may enhance our ability to know and shape ourselves. The paper thus contributes to debates about extended cognition and the impact of technology on human selfhood by identifying a novel way in which technology may transform self-experience: not through radical enhancement or replacement, but through the introduction of an other that is simultaneously experienced as self.

To register and to receive the Zoom link to join the talk, please fill out the following form: https://forms.office.com/e/1MxRxDRfW5

(The Zoom link will be emailed a few hours before the talk to all those who register using the link above.)

On behalf of all the organizers,

Pelin Kasar
PhD Researcher
Department of Philosophy, CEU

kasar_pelin@phd.ceu.edu
https://philosophy.ceu.edu/people/pelin-kasar