Automatons! From Ovid to AI is a King’s jointly-offered course in Contemporary Studies, Early Modern Studies and the History of Science and Technology. It is being presented as a public lecture series, and features guest speakers in a variety of fields of expertise. (link to course no longer active)
January 10, 2018, Alumni Hall, University of King’s College.
Fritz Lang’s classic 1927 film, Metropolis, with live electroacoustic music, opens the Public Lecture Series.
With musical accompaniment by the Upstream Music Association, the screening explores the intersection between electronics and improvisation, automation and real-time inspiration, featuring some of our finest cinematic improvisors: Amy Brandon on guitar and electronics, Steven Naylor on keyboard and electronics, Lukas Pearse on bass and electronics, and Brandon Auger on synthesizer.
January 17, 2018, Alumni Hall, University of King’s College.
Teresa Heffernan of Saint Mary’s University and Director of the “Social Robots Futures” project, delivers the opening lecture on the past and future of robots.
News headlines, government reports, scientific journals, and museums often use fiction to frame discussions of the robotics and artificial intelligence industry, implying a direct trajectory between the fiction and the science. Yet when it comes to real-world policies, the literary imagination is marginalized in discussions of a technological future with the oft-voiced argument that we need to keep the “fiction” out of science. There are all sorts of ways in which fiction and art more generally are mobilized in the service of the robotics/AI industry in order to prove the “creativity” and autonomy of artificial intelligence; what gets shut down, however, is the critical potential of art. Resisting the tendency to read science as fiction coming true, this talk will consider the very different ways science and fiction imagine robots, artificial intelligence, and technological futures.
January 25, 2018, Alumni Hall, University of King’s College.
Hero of Alexandria, known for his works on topics from theoretical mechanics to catapult design, describes his theatrical automata as the culmination of mechanics. This lecture will introduce these automata and the mechanisms that drove them, consider what it means to think of “programming” in terms of concrete materials rather than as abstractions of bits and bytes, and trace the cultural value of Hero’s automata from the Roman world to the Renaissance.
Courtney Ann Roby is Associate Professor of Classics at Cornell University and author of The Written Machine between Alexandria and Rome (2016) and Hero of Alexandria (forthcoming).
February 14, 2018, Alumni Hall, University of King’s College.
Dr. Stan Matwin, Canada Research Chair in Computer Science, Dalhousie University, will explore the future of Artificial Intelligence, its hopes and fears. Will AI eliminate your job? Will it affect mine? Can we expect superhuman robots? Can AI become dangerous for humans? Dr. Teresa Heffernan of the “Social Robot Futures” at Saint Mary’s University will respond, followed by public discussion.
February 28, 2018, Alumni Hall, University of King’s College.
March 7, 2018, Alumni Hall, University of King’s College.
March 21, 2018, Scotiabank Auditorium, Saint Mary’s University.
Noel Sharkey, renowned professor of robotics and popular BBC commentator, and Duncan MacIntosh, Professor of Philosophy at Dalhousie University, debate the role of autonomous weapons and killer machines. What’s this future going to look like? What’s that mean for us? To what degree should we be concerned?
March 29, 2018, Alumni Hall, University of King’s College.
Drawing on the novel and film versions of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and contemporary science fiction such as Ex Machina and Westworld, this talk explores the idea and treatment of the artificial person in a human world. In particular, Dr. Despina Kakoudaki will look at how mechanical or constructed people are often set up as foils to humans as a way of examining our emotions, traumas, rights and identities.
Dr. Kakoudaki is a Professor of Literature, American University, Washington DC and the author of Anatomy of a Robot: Literature, Cinema, and the Cultural Work of Artificial People. You can learn more about her interest in robots in film and literature on her website.
April 4, 2018, Alumni Hall, University of King’s College.
The notion of “human” has changed in Artificial Intelligence research. Where “traditional” A.I. sought to explicitly reproduce human faculties in machines, today any resemblance is incidental to the primary goal making good predictions or solving hard problems.
With King’s alumna and University of Pennsylvania professor, Stephanie Dick, Author of Of Models and Machines.