One of the claims advanced in scholarship on technology-induced conceptual disruption is that conceptual engineering should not be understood in terms of detached amelioration, but rather in terms of situated adaptation (Hopster and Löhr 2023).
Emerging technologies disrupt the fundamental concepts through which we make sense of the world (Hopster & Löhr 2023, Marchiori & Scharp 2024, Anderson et al 2026).
Famously, Jeremy Bentham grounds moral considerability in the capacity to suffer. Peter Singer, following Bentham, broadens the criterion to sentience, i.e., the capacity for pain and pleasure, which still entails the capacity to suffer.
Over the past years, a substantial portion of the research on socially disruptive technologies has concentrated on the phenomenon of conceptual disruption.
Artificial intelligence is increasingly embedded within architecture, engineering, and construction workflows, shaping how design knowledge is generated, decisions are negotiated, and professional expertise is enacted.
As artificially intelligent systems gain increasing capacity for decision-making and social interaction, they are rapidly entering ethically sensitive domains such as healthcare, military operations, and digital companionship.
In 1993, a famous New Yorker cartoon “On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog" joked about online anonymity and disguised identity as emblem of early web culture.
I argue that concepts are public goods: they are non-rival (my grasp and use of TABLE does not diminish yours) and (variably) non-excludable (I cannot prevent you from learning or using the concept FREEDOM).
Natural kinds have played a central role in philosophy, informing accounts of scientific explanation and the semantics of proper names (e.g. “Feynman”) and mass terms (e.g. “gold”).