Interviews
— Video interview with Teresa Heffernan
In this CTV News interview, Bruce Frisko talks with Saint Mary’s University professor Teresa Heffernan, editor of Cyborg Futures: Trans-disciplinary Perspectives on Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, about the effects of AI and robotics on our lives today, and the role of beliefs and fictional representations in driving the development of these technologies.
Read more “AI and Cyborg Futures”
Events
This talk by Teresa Heffernan considers the far reaches of the multi-billion-dollar immortality industry and the money and power behind the scenes that fuels this fantasy science even as the planet teeters on the brink of collapse. After examining some contemporary fictions that challenge big tech and its paradoxical escalation of the end of all life even as it hankers after life without death in its relentless focus on a future that is always “future,” this talk then turns to archaeology and the future’s archaic longings.
Read more “AI, the Immortality Industry, and the Ethics of Death”
Discussion
In mid-January 2020, it was reported that scientists created the first “living robot” which represents a new class of biological artefact in the form of a “programmable organism” according to headlines in the Independent and Wired. Elsewhere, the ability of these new entities to “walk” was highlighted by the Guardian, opening up possibilities for potential advances of the technology for “drug delivery” and “toxic waste clean-up” as highlighted by Science Daily, all of which invites new “opportunities and risks” according to Forbes.
Read more “A Comment on “Living Robots””
Talks/Presentations
— Video
In a presentation on the ethical challenges emerging with the rapid expansion of AI and robotics, in which the humanities too have become a target of automation, Teresa Heffernan argues that it is only by maintaining the tensions between these domains that we can hope to have an informed debate about the limits and possibilities of the emergent technology.
Read more “On Ethics, AI, and the Humanities”
Discussion
Book Review by Sue Smith
“Enchanting Robots: Intimacy, Magic, and Technology is part of the book series, Social and Cultural Studies of Robots and AI, edited by Kathleen Richardson, Cathrine Hasse and Teresa Heffernan, and is written by Polish academic, Maciej Musiał. In Enchanting Robots Musiał discusses ‘magic’ and ‘magical thinking’ in order to critically assess humanity’s current and projected future relationship with newly emerging robot technology.
Read more “Enchanting Robots: Intimacy, Magic, and Technology”
Discussion
Janelle Monáe is an American singer and songwriter whose concept album series, The Metropolis Suite, portrays androids as sentient beings enslaved by industrial masters. Monáe’s android avatar, Cindi Mayweather, is the mediator between hands and mind, between human and robot. This time-traveling android holds out a spiritual promise of love and triumph. In this mix, we can ask what motifs or myths adhere in the idea of artificial intelligence (AI)? And is religious thinking antithetical to political resistance?
Read more “Janelle Monáe’s Spiritual Android”
News
–Journalist Eric Benson’s week-long experience
As Teresa Heffernan noted here last week, at the Silicon Valley-based Singularity University, “faith in technology and profit are unwavering, while the world’s problems are understood as great ‘market’ opportunities.” In March 2013, journalist Eric Benson took a weeklong $12,000 course in the Executive Program at the university. Not only was he instructed in the “nearly limitless potential of artificial intelligence, robotics, nanotechnology, and bioinformatics,” he learned that science fiction, religion and the drive to get rich motivate the university’s teachers and students. Benson’s insightful analysis of his experience, “Sci-Fi, Religion, And Silicon Valley’s Quest For Higher Learning At Singularity University” is posted at BuzzFeed.
Feature image source: Eric Benson/Buzzfeed.