The next great technology-induced transformation in human affairs is already underway. It is driven by the ever-accelerating development and deployment of advanced robotics and artificial intelligence. Autonomous weapons, self-driving cars, health-care robots, automated trading systems, computer-assisted medical diagnosis, “smart” controls for household appliances—all of these and more have begun to reshape our economy, our politics, our military, and the very fabric of our daily lives and our social relations. Combine developments in robotics and artificial intelligence with the internet revolution and the revolutions in synthetic biology and nanotechnology, and a radically different future world appears before us swarms of nano-bots conducting full-time, ubiquitous surveillance and re-engineering our bodies from within as we also demolish the human-machine distinction, turning ourselves into custom-built, highly-enhanced androids.
There are numerous urgent and complicated ethical challenges posed by robotics. This talk aims to survey some of the more important and to suggest ways in which we, as a world community, should approach those problems.
This event is part of Notre Dame’s second annual Digital Week, sponsored by the Office of Digital Learning, in collaboration with the Hesburgh Libraries Center for Digital Scholarship, the Center for Research Computing, and OIT Teaching and Learning Technologies. The week will showcase the best of digital teaching, learning, and research taking place at Notre Dame.
For more information, please visit online.nd.edu.