Discussion – Page 6 – Social Robot Futures

An Exception Has Occurred: The Beauty, Dangers, and Inevitability of Ambiguity

May 29, 2017 / algorithms, Coding, Discussion, Panini, Sanskrit, Vikram Chandra

By Ellen MacIntosh During his presentation at the Cyborg Futures Workshop (March 31-April 1st, 2017), author Vikram Chandra called attention to an issue previously overlooked during the conference: the presence of bugs and ambiguity in computer code. Other speakers expressed concern over the potential repercussions of using inexact language when speaking about artificial intelligence, particularly […]

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Cyborg Futures: Born in Fiction

May 13, 2017 / Despina Kakoudaki, Discussion, Illah Nourbakhsh, John Long, Kathleen Richardson, Louis Chude-Sokei, Lucy Suchman, Patrick Crogan, Teresa Heffernan, Vikram Chandra

By Teresa Heffernan We had a wonderful group of international and interdisciplinary speakers at Saint Mary’s University on March 31 to April 1, 2017. They all took time out from their very busy schedules to come to Halifax to discuss robots and artificial intelligence at the Cyborg Futures Workshop. Academics from literary theory, digital culture,

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Learning American Manners: Pepper Robots, My Fair Lady and the Spirit of Capitalism

June 22, 2016 / Discussion, Foxconn, George Bernard Shaw, Pepper, Robots

By Karen Asp “Pepper is finally coming to America.” So IEEE Spectrum editor Erico Guizzo wrote in a piece covering SoftBank Mobile Corporation’s announcement on May 19th that its humanoid robot Pepper will be introduced to North American markets later this year (Guizzo 2016). To say “finally” seems something of an overstatement: Japanese telecom Softbank

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Imagine a Robot: ROAR, WALL-E, and Working Class Heroes

February 24, 2016 / Andrew Stanton, Automation, Discussion, Garbage Collection, Volvo, Wall-E

By Karen Asp “Imagine a robot that quietly and discreetly enters your neighborhood, collects your refuse bin and empties it into the refuse truck” (Volvo 2015). With this invitation the Volvo Group announced last fall that it was developing an autonomous “smart machine” to take over a task currently performed by people.

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