Next DigHum Lecture Series talk:

Tuesday, March 31, 2026 at 5:00 p.m. (17:00) Central European Summer Time (UTC+2)

Topic: “The egocentric I, the undifferentiated we, and I-you attachment; A pronominal political-ethical approach to technological attachment figures from robots to AI”
(scroll down for abstract and CV)

Speaker: Kathleen Richardson (De Montfort University, UK)
Moderator: Nathalie Weidenfeld (DE)

To participate in the talks via Zoom go to: https://tuwien.zoom.us/j/96389928143?pwd=UU5YRkNuRmdoWHV4MFBwMWRCcUErdz09
(Password: 0dzqxqiy)

The talk will be live streamed and recorded on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/digitalhumanism

For further announcements and information about the speakers in the Lecture Series, see https://dighum.org/#latest-news. Please note that you can access the slides and recordings of our past events via that link.

In case you missed the last lecture by Stefan Szeider you can watch the recording of “LLMs When Left Alone”.


Announcement of our next events:
24.03.26 Celebrating 1 Million Downloads of our book “Introduction to Digital Humanism”
26.03.26 IWM Digital Humanism Fellowship Lecture with Toby Walsh “The AI Race: Boom or Doom?”
21.04.26 DigHum Lecture Darja Djordjevic on AI companionship
reminder our new public calendar: https://calendar.google.com/calendar/ical/dighumtuwien%40gmail.com/public/basic.ics

We are looking forward to seeing you!

Stefan Woltran




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ABSTRACT “The egocentric I, the undifferentiated we, and I-you attachment; A pronominal political-ethical approach to technological attachment figures from robots to AI”:

>From so-called sex, love and companionship dolls, robots and AI increasingly presented as substitutes for human relationships, this talk will provide a pronominal political-ethical framework to make sense of this phenomena and why it signifies the end of love. The talk will explore a politics of love rooted in I-you attachment.

Short Bio of Kathleen Richardson:

Kathleen Richardson is Professor of Ethics and Culture of Robots and AI at De Montfort University, UK. In 2015 she founded the Campaign Against Sex Robots exploring the harms of so-called “sex tech”. Her new book, Sex Robots: The End of Love (2025) presents a new pronominal political-ethical framework to make sense of artefacts created to be relational others.

Short Bio of Nathalie Weidenfeld:

Nathalie Weidenfeld was born in France and grew up in France and Germany. She lived in the United States for several years and received her PhD in American cultural history at the Free University Berlin. She has since then published fictional and non-fictional work and taught creative writing and film studies at the University of Munich. Together with Julian Nida-Rümelin she published the book “Digital Humanism” (Digitaler Humanismus: Eine Ethik für das Zeitalter der Künstlichen Intelligenz) in 2018 and (revised edition 2023), where they advocate a realistic assessement of AI and the use of digital technology for humanistic means.