By: Johan Redström, Heather Wiltse
Part of State of Responsible Tech 2025, Generative Things
Redström, J., Wiltse, H. (2025). On finding our place in a world. In RIOT 2025, State of Responsible Tech – Generative Things (pp. 49-54). Stichting ThingsCon Amsterdam
https://thingscon.org/publications/riot-2025/riot-2025-on-finding-our-place-in-a-world/
Abstact (generated):
This essay offers a philosophical and phenomenological reflection on the entanglement of human life with computational infrastructures, exploring how pervasive artificial agents reconfigure our capacity to orient, act, and dwell meaningfully in the world. Redström and Wiltse interrogate dominant narratives of AI-driven optimization, where artificial assistants increasingly mediate—even displace—human experiences, skills, and forms of presence. Drawing on design theory, political philosophy, and media ecology, they argue that contemporary computational things differ fundamentally from traditional tools, operating less as extensions of human intention and more as autonomous, attention-shaping assemblages. The authors highlight the dissonance between the promise of frictionless life and the resultant erosion of embodied knowledge, civic agency, and collective place-making. Proposing a shift from individualist escapes (e.g., digital detox) to shared acts of care and situated design, they advocate for an affirmative design ethos that supports human capacities for attunement, trust, and relational grounding. This contribution calls for urgent reflection on the kinds of worlds intelligent technologies co-create—and for whom—reclaiming design as a practice of shaping plural and livable futures.