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Sisyphean Servants: Robots' Rights and Meaningful Lives with Speaker Prof. Craig Duncan
- When:
- Location:
- Bogomolny Library
- Room:
- 412
- https://cglink.me/2g3/r2134734
- Description:
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Speaker Craig Duncan is Professor of Philosophy at Ithaca College. A specialist in ethics, political philosophy, and the philosophy of religion, he has published articles in journals such as The Philosophical Review, Philosophical Studies, and Philosophy Compass, and is the co-author of Libertarianism: For and Against.
Suppose in the future we create highly intelligent robot servants. Would we in effect be creating “artificial people” whom we treat as slaves? Perhaps not: if we create robots who take great delight in doing household chores, for instance, then we would be giving such beings an opportunity to do what they most desire to do, rather than enslaving them. In that case, however, we encounter a new issue: Since we humans would find lives full of nothing but menial chores to be meaningless lives, we should ask: Would it be ethical to design artificial people so that they choose to live meaningless lives? In this talk, I argue it would NOT be ethical for us to create such artificial people. We would be programming artificial people to find intrinsic value in tasks that are merely instrumentally valuable. We would be thus be creating deluded people, and in doing so, our actions would be akin to those of self-serving propagandists, and wrong for similar reasons.
- Contact Name:
- Alicia Ryan
- Contact Email:
- ethics@ubalt.edu
Appropriate accommodations for individuals with disabilities will be provided upon request 10 days prior to a campus event and 30 days prior to an event requiring travel.
