Technical augmentation designates a technical artifact or system that externally supports, extends, or replaces the actualization of the faculties of a bearer of intelligence. In substance-ontological terms it is a tool — the augmentation belongs to the second actualization (deutera energeia), not to the essential form (prote energeia). The person remains a person with or without augmentation; what changes is not what they are, but how they realize themselves.
The class encompasses very different cases: reading glasses, the hearing aid, the exoskeleton, the cochlear implant, the brain-computer interface, the cobot tool, augmented-reality glasses, and language-model assistance. They all share the tool-structure: a bearer uses the artifact for an act that is grounded in the bearer’s own faculty.
Ontological classification: Superordinate concept: technical artifact; subordinate concepts: brain-computer interface, sensory augmentation (glasses, hearing aid), motor augmentation (exoskeleton, prosthesis), cognitive augmentation (notebook, language-model assistance).
Distinction from the classical human-machine interface
The classical discipline of human-computer interaction (HCI) — the design of screens, input devices, and user interfaces — is personal-ontologically inconspicuous. Mouse, keyboard, and touchscreen are tools like pencil and paper; they change nothing about the constitution of the person who operates them. Only when the interface crosses the body-artifact boundary (implant) or is understood as constitutively cognitive (see the extended-mind thesis) does it become personal-ontologically relevant.
Two methodological temptations
Reduction — whoever dismisses augmentation as mere tool-use misses its ethical breadth. A cochlear implant restitutes the communicative conditions of life; an enhancement implant serves to increase capacities beyond the species-typical normal range. Both are technical augmentation; only the first is ethically unproblematic.
Substance-shift — whoever interprets augmentation as a change of essence (cyborg transition, posthuman species) asserts an ontological leap that does not show itself technically. The tool changes the tool-relation, not the tool-user.
Connection to the structure of actualization
Personal ontology distinguishes two levels of actualization: the essential form of the person (prote energeia) and the concrete enactments (deutera energeia). Augmentation intervenes exclusively at the second level. It can accelerate, sharpen, or newly enable the enactments — but it does not constitute personhood. A person whose glasses break remains a person. A human being in a coma, without any enactment at all, remains a person.
Ethical classification according to the ontology of personhood
The ontology of personhood provides no blanket judgment for the family of augmentations, but rather a preparatory structuring: because augmentation is fundamentally a tool (an intervention in deutera energeia, not in prote energeia), it cannot be rejected as a class on ethical grounds. Whoever did so would have to consistently reject glasses, hearing aids, and wheelchairs as well — which the personalist tradition has never done, because tool-use is part of the human structure of enactment.
The ethical assessment arises only at the purpose of the respective augmentation, not at the tool itself. Three conditions follow from the ontological tool-determination:
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Restitutive versus constructive. Augmentation that restores a normal enactment lost through illness or injury is personalistically legitimate — it respects the person by restituting the conditions of their manifestation (cochlear implant for the deaf child, therapeutic BCI for the locked-in patient). Augmentation that surpasses the species-typical normal enactment treats personhood as an optimizable substrate and falls under the transhumanist reservation (enhancement BCI, cognitive doping implants).
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Consent and respect for dignity. The tool-relation has a subject-bearer whom the augmentation serves. Whoever augments without consent reverses the relation: the tool is assigned a bearer, instead of the bearer using a tool. This is the fundamental violation of the Personalist Norm — the person as object of the augmentation, not as its subject.
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Striving for reversibility. Where possible, augmentation should keep open the possibility of its discontinuation. A technical augmentation that becomes irreversibly entwined (chronic brain stimulation without a reliable deactivation option, neural fusion) hinders subsequent personalist corrections. This is not an absolute prohibition, but a criterion for the choice of the type of augmentation.
Substance-ontological clarification. Even maximal augmentation does not change what a person is — the essential form remains unchanged. Whoever understands augmentation as a change of essence engages in an implicit anthropotechnics of self-construction, which the personalist tradition marks as superbia (self-deification). The dividing line is not “human without tool versus human with tool” — but “tool as aid versus tool as essence-construction”.
Counterargument. A sharper position argues that every augmentation shapes the enactment-habits of the person and thereby de facto does change their identity. Reply: there is a categorial difference between shaping through habit and constitution of the essential form. Habits shape — the essential form constitutes. Personalist ontology respects the shaping effect without elevating it to the constitutive.
Sources: Generated by querying the Personhood ontology. Research as of 7 June 2026 (dossier HCI / BCI — Worldwide Research).
Further sources:
- Spaemann, Robert (1996): Personen. Versuche über den Unterschied zwischen „etwas” und „jemand”. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta.
- Bexten, Raphael (2017): Was ist menschliches Personsein? Der Mensch im Spannungsfeld von Personvergessenheit und unverlierbarer ontologischer Würde. Dissertation, Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt.
- Clark, Andy (2003): Natural-Born Cyborgs. Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence. Oxford: Oxford University Press.