Colloqium #41
Apr 15, 2026 at 7:30 pm CEST
Description
When we interact with ChatGPT, a navigation system, or a voice assistant, something happens that is not quite captured by the question: „Do I believe this thing is conscious?“ Before we make any judgment at all, something else is already at play—a pre-reflective, felt dimension of the interaction. On this pre-reflective level, I will argue, we experience the application or thing in question as attentive, as another responsive being.
This talk offers a phenomenological perspective on how we experience artificial agents in everyday life. Drawing on Sartre’s analysis of the “look,” it argues that AI systems increasingly elicit a sense of being addressed—of being the target of directed attention—whether or not we attribute consciousness to them. But this structure of experience does not emerge in a vacuum. As I will argue, it is mediated by background conditions that are shaped and changed via experience, exposure and habituation. Here, the talk introduces the concepts of “background hijacking” and “background entrapment” to analyze how platform capitalism exploits this dynamic, turning (artificial) care and attention into commodities.
The question we find ourselves confronted with regarding AI is thus not only what we think about it, but how our experiential landscape is being reconfigured—often beneath the threshold of explicit awareness. What does this mean for sociality, for the Other, and for what it means to be human?"
Speakers
Tom Poljanšek: Tom Poljanšek studied Philosophy and Modern German Literature. He earned his PhD in 2019 at the University of Stuttgart with a dissertation on the ontology of shared worlds and recently completed his habilitation on the philosophy of the situation. His main research areas are phenomenology, theories of experience, philosophy of technology, and aesthetics.