Robot Ethics

Presented by Don Howard

The robot revolution is upon us, and it brings with it a wide array of ethical challenges. Should we permit the development of autonomous weapons? Is the replacement of human workers by robots a serious future problem and, and if so, what are we to do about it? What happens to human privacy as we share our world with more and more robots? Should we be trying to program ethics into robots and, if so, how can that be. In this seminar, we will consider these and several other such questions and learn some basic ethical concepts and theories that will help us in that work.

About Don Howard

Don Howard is the former Director and a Fellow of the University of Notre Dame's Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values, where he now functions as co-director of the center's Ethics of Emerging Technologies focus area. A Fellow the American Physical Society, Past Chair of APS's Forum on the History of Physics, and current Chair of its Committee on International Freedom of Scientists, Howard is an internationally recognized expert on the history and philosophy of modern physics, especially of Einstein and Bohr.