Offloading Wisdom: Four Technological Relations that Mediate Phronesis

Abstract Although there has been much discussion regarding how technology mediates our practical and ethical lives, little has been said about how it mediates phronesis : the skilled deliberative capacity to direct our lives well. With new and emerging technologies like the generative AI of Chat-GPT, mindfulness apps such as Wysa and Headspace, and the datafication of our everyday lives, it becomes necessary to ask how these technologies and practices affect our ability to reason towards and actualize flourishing lives. I argue that (1) phronesis is a technologically mediated capacity whose mediation is best understood from the postphenomenological perspective; (2) through an adaptation of Albert Borgmann’s ideas of commanding and disposable realities, practical wisdom’s mediation can be understood through augmenting, diminishing, and displacing relationships with technology; (3) the rapid proliferation of new and emerging AI technologies threaten to emphasize disposable realities over commanding realities, which leads to a diminishing of phronesis, and by extension human flourishing. If we are interested in creating and using technology in ways that promote human wellbeing, we must first understand how these technologies mediate phronesis and consider what sorts of technological relationships benefit that deliberative skill.