Open University 2028 Autumn

Technology is often presented as something external to morality: technologies are developed, and society subsequently has to decide how they should be used. Yet technologies do not simply provide neutral tools for human action. They shape what people can do, what they notice, how they relate to one another, what kinds of decisions become possible, and what forms of behaviour become normal. This semester explores the moral dimensions of technology by asking not only “What should we do with technology?” but “What kinds of people, relationships and societies do particular technologies help us become?” The question is particularly urgent in the age of artificial intelligence, algorithmic decision-making, social media, surveillance and increasingly autonomous systems, but it also has a much longer history: technologies of writing, printing, navigation, industrial production, medicine and communication have always transformed human practices and social relations. This perspective makes morality something more than a set of rules applied after technological development has taken place. Shannon Vallor, for example, argues that emerging technologies create forms of “technosocial opacity” in which it becomes difficult to foresee the consequences of technological change, and proposes the cultivation of technomoral virtues as a way of responding to this uncertainty. The semester would bring together philosophy, literature, cultural studies, history, sociology, technology studies and AI ethics to explore how technologies participate in the formation of values, habits and forms of life. In this context, the humanities have a distinctive role: not simply to warn about technological dangers or provide ethical principles for engineers, but to help us imagine, interpret and critically examine the kinds of worlds that technologies make possible — and to ask what kinds of worlds we actually want to inhabit.