Don Ihde in the age of AI: how technology reshapes human experience

Don Ihde died on 17 January 2024, three days after celebrating his ninetieth birthday.

He was the founder of the philosophy department at Stony Brook University, which he established in the early seventies and from which he retired in 2012 after forty-three years. He wrote more than twenty books and edited many more; his work has been translated into a dozen languages.

In November, following his death, the department held a memorial conference. It was organised by the department chair Robert Crease and the doctoral student Juan Arteaga, and brought together some forty participants, from Ihde's first students in the seventies to his last doctoral candidate.

The phrase Crease used at the conference reflects the general view in the field: “He was America's greatest philosopher of technology — and its pioneer.”

The founding text of a field#

Ihde's Technics and Praxis, published in 1979, is usually counted the first work in the philosophy of technology in North America.

At the time no such subdiscipline existed. In Europe there were the texts of Heidegger and Ellul, but they treated technology as a whole, as a cultural destiny.

Ihde took another road.

Postphenomenology: an exit from wholesale thinking#

The approach he founded is called postphenomenology. He uses the prefix in two senses: coming after classical phenomenology, and departing from some of its assumptions.

The point of departure is this. Classical phenomenology looks for the general structures of experience. Ihde argues that experience is always mediated, and that the medium itself must therefore enter the analysis.

And these mediators have to be examined one by one. There is no single thing called “technology”; the telescope, the hearing aid, the motor car and the search engine produce different structures of experience. His approach is not anthropocentric: what stands at the centre is neither the human being nor the machine, but the relation the two form.

Mediation: what do we see, and how?#

Ihde's most fruitful contribution is his classification of human-technology relations.

Embodiment relations. The instrument joins the body and becomes transparent. A person wearing spectacles does not see the spectacles; he sees with them. A person using a cane feels not the cane but the ground. The instrument becomes an extension of perception.

Hermeneutic relations. The instrument turns the world into a text to be read. A person looking at a thermometer does not feel the temperature, he reads it. An X-ray does not show the bone; it offers a sign that has to be interpreted.

Background relations. The instrument shapes the environment without being noticed. The hum of an air conditioner, the electricity grid, network infrastructure. They become visible only when they break down.

The strength of the scheme is that it offers an account of technology that neither exalts nor demonises it. Instruments are not neutral — they shape perception — but neither are they determining; in different contexts they do different work. Ihde calls this multistability.

Sound and music#

The non-visual side of Ihde is often overlooked.

His Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound sets hearing against philosophy's sight-centred tradition. Western philosophy has largely built its concepts out of visual metaphors: theory (theoria, to look at), enlightenment, clarity, evidence.

Ihde argues that hearing offers a different structure of world. Sound surrounds; its direction is uncertain; it unfolds in time. The world constituted through sound is not the world constituted through sight.

This interest surfaced concretely at the memorial conference: Judith Lochhead, professor of music history, who had worked with Ihde on the phenomenology of music, played music during her talk to explain the method the two of them shared.

Arteaga, for his part, described putting Ihde's book to work in an unexpected area: the analysis of protest chants.

Why artificial intelligence has brought Ihde back#

Crease's observation after the conference was that, at a moment when we are all thinking about the philosophy of artificial intelligence, Ihde's work is more current than ever.

The reason lies in the shape of the question.

The debate about artificial intelligence runs largely on two questions. Do these systems think? Could they be conscious? Those are questions in the philosophy of mind and, as the debate we reported on this site makes clear, they have no easy answers.

Ihde's framework changes the question: how do these systems shape the way we perceive the world?

That question requires no verdict about what is going on inside the machine. Someone working with a language model is in a position rather like the wearer of spectacles: to the degree that the instrument becomes transparent, one forgets that the text it produces has passed through a mediation. In Ihde's terms, an embodiment relation is established and the instrument's own tendencies become invisible.

The questions that follow are not technical but phenomenological. Are the questions we are able to ask being shaped by the questions the instrument makes easy? Is our sense of what makes a text “good” drifting towards the kind of text the model produces?

The legacy#

What Ihde left behind is less a theory than a research programme.

Peter-Paul Verbeek, rector of the University of Amsterdam and professor of the ethics of technology, was among the speakers at the memorial conference; he is known for carrying postphenomenology into design ethics. Robert Rosenberger of Georgia Tech, one of Ihde's doctoral students, continues to publish work in the field.

Crease reports that a volume will be assembled from the conference. Ihde's name is also the source of Stony Brook's international standing in the philosophy of technology.

In Turkish#

Ihde's books have not yet been translated into Turkish. The concept of postphenomenology has circulated in Turkey mostly by way of design research and media studies.

If the philosophy of technology is ever established in Turkey as a field in its own right, Ihde's texts look likely to stand at the head of the reading list.