Philosophy 101D

Our final screening will be this Thursday at 7pm in Wohler Hall rm 24. Wohler is directly behind DKH.

We will be watching the documentary Love Machine by Peter Asaro and Doug Matejka. From the press release:

Love Machine considers the social and moral implications of building humanoid robots sophisticated enough to participate in social and emotional roles that are traditionally considered exclusively or even essentially human: friendship, sex and love. The film examines the actual technologies being developed in these directions, and discusses these issues with the people who are pursuing these technologies as well as those who seek to profit from them. It also confronts various social critics, commentators and philosophers of different perspectives in a effort to open a dialogue on what implications these technologies might have for human relationships in the future.

Among those interviewed are:

Roboticists:
Rodney Brooks, Director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Hans Moravec, Carnegie Mellon University
Gill Pratt, Cynthia Breazeal, and Brian Scassellatti, MIT
Ken Goldberg, University of California, Berkeley.

Philosophers:
Daniel Dennett, Tufts University
Hubert Dreyfus, Univesity of California, Berkeley
Manuel DeLanda, Columbia University and Institute of Advanced Study-Princeton

Sex & Culture Commentators:
Carol Queen, Robert Morgan Lawrence and Lisa Palac
Ernest Green, Editor of Taboo Magazine

Childhood technology-use advocates:
Joan Almon, and Colleen Cordes

and the entrepreneurs building such products as the Sybian and Real Doll and others . . .