Can Machines Be Exemplary Persons?

Location

Janet Ayers Academic Center, JAAC 4094

Presentation Type

Presentation

Start Date

19-9-2016 10:00 AM

Description

In this session, we explore under what conditions technology has not merely enhanced the Humanities as a discipline, but the meaning of humanity itself. We uncover the unstated philosophy behind not only the commitment to humanoid robots. We give attention not merely to the construction of a machine to enhance human life, but to the development of autonomous, intelligent, robot technologies as authentically persons in a post humanoid reality. To do this, we will take a whirlwind journey from the earliest roots of mechanical men found in the examples of androids and cyborgs in ancient Chinese texts, through the fascination with this project in elite European thinkers especially in the eighteenth century, to the current iterations of Asimo, Aiko, Geminoid and Jules. These investigations take us into the regions of machine as self and what it is to be and act as an exemplary person.

Comments

Monteverde Lecture

Convocation Credit: Global Citizenship, Leadership, Diversity and the Professions

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Sep 19th, 10:00 AM

Can Machines Be Exemplary Persons?

Janet Ayers Academic Center, JAAC 4094

In this session, we explore under what conditions technology has not merely enhanced the Humanities as a discipline, but the meaning of humanity itself. We uncover the unstated philosophy behind not only the commitment to humanoid robots. We give attention not merely to the construction of a machine to enhance human life, but to the development of autonomous, intelligent, robot technologies as authentically persons in a post humanoid reality. To do this, we will take a whirlwind journey from the earliest roots of mechanical men found in the examples of androids and cyborgs in ancient Chinese texts, through the fascination with this project in elite European thinkers especially in the eighteenth century, to the current iterations of Asimo, Aiko, Geminoid and Jules. These investigations take us into the regions of machine as self and what it is to be and act as an exemplary person.