Sven Thomas

Since April 2022, I have been working as a research assistant for Junior Professor Suzana Alpsancar in the Heinz Nixdorf Institute's associated specialist group for applied ethics with a focus on technology ethics in the digital world. My research focuses on questions that examine the influence of new technical artefacts on our interaction with others and with the world. I am particularly interested in the everyday, such as how we deal with and use language machines, social media or dating platforms, as well as technologies that run in the background, such as the algorithmic translation of languages. My doctoral project has the working title: ‘Speaking with machines. A praxis and its constitution of the social’. In this project, I am investigating the implications of linguistic interaction with machines for the constitution of the users' world view and self-image as well as their sociality. I mainly refer to the works of Günther Anders, Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin and Emauel Levinas. With my studies, I would like to contribute to a more conscious use of the many new inventions, so that we can emphasise the advantages they bring to our lives and not passively succumb to their inherent logics.