Mariska Bosschaert Vincent Blok
This PhD research addresses the question what digitalization has actually changed in society. Precisely because digitalization has brought about extensive change, it is easy to hold assumptions about what these changes entail. Examples of such assumptions include the tendency to regard contemporary technologies as superior to more traditional ones or the belief that AI technologies constitute optimal solutions to address major societal challenges, such as climate change. The difficulty with the latter assumption is that it may obscure the negative aspects of AI technologies, including their environmental and climate-related impacts.
However, since this is a highly general issue, a subsequent question concerns how such an inquiry could be empirically informed in order to ensure its relevance beyond the philosophical domain. To be explicit about relating the empirical and stuctural, a concrete method will be developed to answer the question what digitalization has actually changed in society. To demonstrate the added value of answering this question, the method is applied to Computer Vision technology in livestock farming.
The main research question of this research is: What method integrates empirical with structural dimensions of digitalization to answer the question of what digitalization has actually changed in society?
To answer this question this aim, first the notion of âempirical studyâ will be explored. This resulted in the paper The âEmpiricalâ in the Empirical Turn: A Critical Analysis (2023). Second, various structures in which technologies are embedded will be explored, including their relationship to the empirical. This resulted in the paper Towards an Integrated Framework in the Philosophy of Technology: Integrating Philosophical Reflection on Technology in General and Concrete Technologies (2025). Third, the method is developed an applied to precision farming in the paper Towards a Method to Reflect on Foundational Structures: The Case of Precision Farming (2025). Fourth, this proposed method is applied to the case of Computer Vision in Lifestock farming. This resulted in the paper Animal welfare in the world of digitalization: Computer Vision in the context of
foundational structures, which is co-authored by Bart Gremmen. As yet it is unpublished.