Engaging Technologies and Generative Artificial Intelligence
Normative Voluntarism, Infrastructural Alienation, and Conditions of Operability
Keywords:
engaging technologies, generative artificial intelligence, infrastructural alienation, conditions of operability, philosophy of technologyAbstract
This article critically revisits the notion of engaging technologies under the light of generative artificial intelligence (AI). It argues that this tradition retains decisive value insofar as it rejects technological determinism and defends the possibility of orienting technological development through criteria such as openness, docility, participation, responsibility, and sustainability. However, this article claims that some recent developments in this literature tend to overestimate the potential of volition: they assume that honesty, deontology, deliberation, recognition, or technological culture can redirect technical trajectories without sufficiently developing a theory of the material, institutional, and infrastructural conditions under which such orientations become historically operable. By criticizing the treatment of technological alienation as a problem correctable through better mediations, this article proposes the notion of infrastructural alienation to analyze the scale fracture of technologies that appear familiar and docile at the interface, while their conditions of production, training, computation, ownership, and access remain concentrated and non-appropriable. Finally, it argues that generative AI requires shifting critique from the engaging character of artifacts toward the socio-technical conditions of operability.
Downloads
References
Bijker, Wiebe E. (1995). Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs: Toward a Theory of Sociotechnical Change. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Braverman, Harry (1998). Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. Nueva York: Monthly Review Press.
Broncano, Fernando (2025). Las entrañas de la inteligencia artificial y lo entrañable de su uso. Revista Iberoamericana de Ciencia, Tecnología y Sociedad, 20(58), 179-194. DOI: https://doi.org/10.52712/issn.1850-0013-700.
Cofiño Alea, Martín (2018). Las tecnologías entrañables y el futuro de los desarrollos tecnocientíficos a propósito del libro de Miguel Ángel Quintanilla et al. Tecnologías entrañables. SCIO. Revista de Filosofía, (15), 215-221.
Collingridge, David (1980). The social control of technology. Londres: Frances Pinter.
Correa Lucero, Horacio E. & González, Julio E. (2014). El lugar de la estructura social capitalista en la concepción de las tecnologías entrañables. Revista Iberoamericana de Ciencia, Tecnología y Sociedad, 9(27), 207-213. DOI: https://doi.org/10.52712/issn.1850-0013-589.
Correa Lucero, Horacio E. (2015). Tecnología, sociedad e Internet. Hacia una comprensión crítica de la tecnología, las tecnologías digitales y su cambio. Un estudio de las tensiones en torno a la mercantilización en Internet [Tesis doctoral]. Bernal: Universidad Nacional de Quilmes. Recuperado de: https://ridaa.unq.edu.ar/handle/20.500.11807/1042.
Crawford, Kate (2021). Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence. New Haven: Yale University Press.
David, Paul A. (1985). Clio and the Economics of QWERTY. The American Economic Review, 75(2), 332-337.
Feenberg, Andrew (1999). Questioning technology. Londres & Nueva York: Routledge.
Feenberg, Andrew (2005). Critical Theory of Technology: An Overview. Tailoring Biotechnologies, 1(1), 47-64.
Giri, Leandro (2025). Alienación, política y tecnologías entrañables. Revista Iberoamericana de Ciencia, Tecnología y Sociedad, 20(58), 147-165. DOI: https://doi.org/10.52712/issn.1850-0013-717.
Giuliano, Héctor G. (2025). Robert Maynard Pirsig, ¿un precursor de las tecnologías entrañables? Revista Iberoamericana de Ciencia, Tecnología y Sociedad, 20(58), 167-177. DOI: https://doi.org/10.52712/issn.1850-0013-605.
Hacking, Ian (1999). The Social Construction of What? Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Hughes, Thomas P. (1983). Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880-1930. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Hughes, Thomas P. (1987). The Evolution of Large Technological Systems. En Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes & Trevor J. Pinch (Eds.), The Social Construction of Technological Systems. New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology (pp. 51-82). Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Lawler, Diego & Sandrone, Darío (2025). Un nuevo eslabón en la cadena del desarrollo tecnológico. Revista Iberoamericana de Ciencia, Tecnología y Sociedad, 20(58), 131-146. DOI: https://doi.org/10.52712/issn.1850-0013-774.
Le Ludec, Clément, Cornet, Maxime & Casilli, Antonio A. (2023). The problem with annotation. Human labour and outsourcing between France and Madagascar. Big Data & Society, 10(2), 20539517231188723. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517231188723.
López Cerezo, José Antonio (2017). ¿Sonambulismo tecnológico? En Miguel Ángel Quintanilla, Martín Parselis, Darío Sandrone & Diego Lawler (Eds.), Tecnologías entrañables: ¿Es posible un modelo alternativo de desarrollo tecnológico? (9-14). Madrid: Catarata.
Marx, Karl (1996). Elementos fundamentales para la crítica de la economía política (Grundrisse). Vol. 2: (Borrador) 1857-1858. Madrid: Siglo XXI de España Editores.
Marx, Karl (2003). El Capital: Libro primero. El proceso de producción del Capital. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI.
Marx, Karl (2015). Manuscritos económico-filosóficos de 1844. Buenos Aires: Colihue.
Miguel, Hernán (2025). Escuela de educadores y tecnologías entrañables. Revista Iberoamericana de Ciencia, Tecnología y Sociedad, 20(58), 195-218. DOI: https://doi.org/10.52712/issn.1850-0013-813.
Noble, David F. (1984). Forces of production: A social history of industrial automation. Nueva York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Parselis, Martín (2016). El valor de las tecnologías entrañables. Revista Iberoamericana de Ciencia, Tecnología y Sociedad, 11(32), 71-83. DOI: https://doi.org/10.52712/issn.1850-0013-464.
Parselis, Martín (2017). La banalidad de la alienación tecnológica. En Hernán Miguel, Marina Camejo & Leandro Giri (Eds.), Ciencia, tecnología y educación: miradas desde la filosofía de la ciencia (101-113). Montevideo: FIC-UDELAR.
Parselis, Martín (2018). La honestidad y otras características deseables para el desarrollo tecnológico. SCIO. Revista de Filosofía, (15), 177-212.
Parselis, Martín (2025). Presentación: Resonancias de las tecnologías entrañables. Revista Iberoamericana de Ciencia, Tecnología y Sociedad, 20(58), 121-130. DOI: https://doi.org/10.52712/issn.1850-0013-871.
Pasquinelli, Matteo & Joler, Vladan (2021). The Nooscope manifested: AI as instrument of knowledge extractivism. AI & Society, 36(4), 1263-1280. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-020-01097-6.
Pinch, Trevor J. & Bijker, Wiebe E. (1984). The Social Construction of Facts and Artefacts: Or How the Sociology of Science and the Sociology of Technology might Benefit Each Other. Social Studies of Science, 14(3), 399-441. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/030631284014003004.
Quintanilla, Miguel Ángel (2005). Tecnología: un enfoque filosófico y otros ensayos de filosofía de la tecnología. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica.
Quintanilla, Miguel Ángel (2009). Tecnologías entrañables. Sinpermiso, 25 de octubre. Recuperado de: https://www.sinpermiso.info/textos/tecnologas-entraables.
Quintanilla, Miguel Ángel (2017). Tecnologías entrañables: Un modelo alternativo de desarrollo tecnológico. En Miguel Ángel Quintanilla, Martín Parselis, Darío Sandrone & Diego Lawler (Eds.), Tecnologías entrañables: ¿Es posible un modelo alternativo de desarrollo tecnológico? (15-53). Madrid: Catarata.
Quintanilla, Miguel Ángel (2018). Engaging Technologies: Criteria for an Alternative Model of Technological Development. En Belén Laspra & José Antonio López Cerezo (Eds.), Spanish Philosophy of Technology: Contemporary Work from the Spanish Speaking Community (103-123). Cham: Springer International Publishing. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71958-0_8.
Quintanilla, Miguel Ángel, Parselis, Martín, Sandrone, Darío & Lawler, Diego (2017). Tecnologías entrañables: ¿Es posible un modelo alternativo de desarrollo tecnológico? Madrid: Catarata.
Rosen, Paul (1993). The Social Construction of Mountain Bikes: Technology and Postmodernity in the Cycle Industry. Social Studies of Science, 23(3), 479-513. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312793023003003.
Sadowski, Jathan (2019). When data is capital: Datafication, accumulation, and extraction. Big Data & Society, 6(1), 2053951718820549. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951718820549.
Srnicek, Nick (2017). Platform Capitalism. Cambridge & Malden: Polity.
Winner, Langdon (1980). Do Artifacts Have Politics? Daedalus, 109(1), 121-136.
Winner, Langdon (1986). The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Zuboff, Shoshana (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. Nueva York: PublicAffairs.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2026 CC Attribution 4.0
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
All CTS's issues and academic articles are under a CC-BY license.
Since 2007, CTS has provided open and free access to all its contents, including the complete archive of its quarterly edition and the different products presented in its electronic platform. This decision is based on the belief that offering free access to published materials helps to build a greater and better exchange of knowledge.
In turn, for the quarterly edition, CTS allows institutional and thematic repositories, as well as personal web pages, to self-archive articles in their post-print or editorial version, immediately after the publication of the final version of each issue and under the condition that a link to the original source will be incorporated into the self-archive.
