
Androids, Automata, Avatars, and Agency
On Tuesday, February 5, in the Bender Room at Green Library, Jessica Riskin and Oussama Khatib will join Nicole Coleman in conversation about robotics past and future. Both have been thinking deeply about artificial life and artificial intelligence throughout their careers. While Khatib has been building robots and breaking new ground in human-robot collaboration, Riskin’s work explores the way that early automatons influenced the mechanistic view of mind and body, evolution and inheritance, and how our relationship to machines continues to influence our thinking today about whether human beings have agency in shaping their destiny.