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Summary USE Quality of Life 0SEUA0
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Summary Quality of Life
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Summary QOL 19/20Week 1 – Introduction
Engineering responsibilities
• Avoiding unprofessional conduct.
• Preventing harm to the public.
• Promoting the public good.
• Protection of public health, safety, and welfare.
• Utilize knowledge to improve human welfare and environment.
• Recognize importance of technologies.
Hard and soft impacts
Hard impacts
Focus on health, safety, and environmental risks.
• Considered objective, factual, and public.
• Narrow focus.
• The harms are clear.
• Physical harms.
• Quantifiable.
• Causal links between technology and impact are clear and direct.
• Fit easily into consequentialist thinking favoured by policymakers.
Revenge effects
Exact opposite of the intended ones.
• ‘Light’ cigarettes
• Computers to combat paper waste
• Energy saving light bulbs
Mediation of action
Unforeseen technologically mediated behavioural changes.
Intended impacts
Technology is not neutral, it embodies our biases, prejudices, stereotypes.
Designers have presumptions about user:
• Kitchens are too low for men..
• Presumes woman need to be in the kitchen.
Unintended impacts
• Making iPod and iPhone for enlightenment.
• Kids are emotionally related to the device.
Soft impacts
• Difficult to quantify.
• Harms less clear (indirect).
, • Way in which technology shapes our behaviour, relationships, norms, vales, rights,
duties, expectations, routines etc. (technological mediation)
• Morally ambiguous: not clear whether impact is god or bad.
o E.g. due to conflicting values (privacy vs safety)
How to take into account all impacts?
• Explore in advance how innovation might effect reasons behind people’s (moral)
actions.
• Taking a forward looking responsibility: Exploring what technology’s soft impacts
might be.
Technological mediation
Technology plays an active part in shaping environment.
Technology mediates how we perceive the world
• Mediation of Perception: How artefacts mediate human experiences and
interpretations of reality.
• Mediation of action: How artefacts mediate people’s actions and the way they live
their lives.
Mediation of perception Mediation of action
Impact on behaviour
Example: Remote control for television.
Technological innovations influence/mediates how people act.
Reasons to act in a certain way are:
1. What ‘is’ the situation? E.g. Microscope, remote warfare.
2. What ‘can’ I do? E.g. Cars, telephones, EU.
3. What ‘ought’ I to do? E.g. Someone in coma.
Can be good or bad.
,Week 2 – What is QoL (part 1)
Terms:
• Well-being: “The state of being comfortable, healthy, or happy”
• Well-being: “A person’s well-being is what is ‘good for’ them”
• Well-being: “What makes life good”
• Quality of life: “The standard of health, comfort, and happiness experienced by
an individual or group”
• Happiness: “The state of being happy”
• Happiness: “positive feelings and an absence of negative feelings and mental
states; yet, well-being generally implies more than just having positive mental
states.
• Happy: “Feeling or showing pleasure or contentment”
Good relationships keep us happier and healthier.
Value sensitive design (VSD): ‘Room with a view’
Example: A plasma display to serve as ‘window’, impacting values of well-being and privacy.
Results: Worked good, for less than staring 30 seconds.
VSD
• VSD draws on empirical research. (including measures of well-being)
• Considers range of different stakeholders.
• Takes multiple values into account. (Physical health, emotional well-being of
watcher. Privacy, trust, security of watched)
• Translates it into technical investigations.
Hedonist theories
“well-being consists of the presence of pleasure and the absence of pain. A good life is a life
in which one successfully accumulates pleasurable feelings and avoids painful ones” (Brey,
2015)
, 4 pleasures (qualitative hedonism)
• Ideo-pleasure; identity, intellectual.
• Socio-pleasure; The pleasure that comes from social life.
• Psycho-pleasure; Cognitive load, matching mental models.
• Physio-pleasure; Sensorial pleasures.
Quantitative (or Simple) hedonism (Bentham)
Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832): Panopticon: A type of institutional
building and a system of control.
• Pleasure is the only intrinsic good
• Pain is the only intrinsic bad
• Well-being is the greatest balance of pleasure over pain
• The more pleasantness the better, the more pain the worse
life is
• Does not matter what type of pleasure or what its source is
• Measured mainly in terms of duration and intensity
The good life: if the overall total of pleasure is maximised and pain is minimal, on the
whole
Objection by John Stuart Mill
“It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied. Better to be Socrates
dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is
because they only know their own side of the question.”
“Quantitative hedonism has been criticized for putting satisfaction of primitive urges at the
same footing as more sophisticated pleasures, such as those resulting from friendship and
art. The life of a pig is as good as the life of a refined person, on this conception, as long as
the amount of pleasure for both is the same” (Brey, 2015)
Qualitative hedonism (Mill)
John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)
• Certain types of pleasure are more desirable than others, i.e. higher pleasures such
as friendship, knowledge, art, …
• How do you determine/measure pleasure?
o Duration
o Intensity
o Quality
Objection to hedonist theories (experience machine) (Robert Nozick) (total
recall)
The experience machine can give you any experience you desire.
It makes you think and feel that you are writing a great novel, or sailing across an ocean, or
having a romantic dinner with your partner.
But the events you think and feel to take place are mere simulations.
• It will feel exactly as if you succeeded in business, being respected by people, being
loved by a dream partner, and so on.
• Once you are hooked up, all memory of reality will disappear: so you will not know
your experiences are merely appearances.
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