Our Robot Future - Rodney Brooks

"Rodney Brooks, former iRobot CTO, describes the limitations of today's "stiff" factory robots. Looking forward, Brooks envisions a future where people interact with robots in the same way we now work with computers. [...] Dr. Rodney Brooks is a robotics entrepreneur and Founder, Chairman and CTO of Heartland Robotics, Inc. He is also a Founder, Board Member and former CTO (1991 - 2008) of iRobot Corp (Nasdaq: IRBT) and the Panasonic Professor of Robotics (on leave) at MIT. Dr. Brooks is the former Director (1997 - 2007) of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and then the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). He received degrees in pure mathematics from the Flinders University of South Australia and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1981. He held research positions at Carnegie Mellon University and MIT, and a faculty position at Stanford before joining the faculty of MIT in 1984. He has published many papers and books in computer vision, artificial intelligence, robotics, and artificial life."

Source: fora.tv

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Etienne Wenger: 'walking the landscape of practice'

Understanding Violence

This volume sets out to give a philosophical “applied” account of violence, engaging with both empirical and theoretical debates in other disciplines such as cognitive science, sociology, psychiatry, anthropology, political theory, evolutionary biology, and theology. The book’s primary thesis is that violence, also understood as violence beyond the domain of physical harm, is inescapably intertwined with morality and typically enacted for “moral” reasons. To show this, the book compellingly demonstrates how morality operates to trigger and justify violence and how people, in their violent behaviors, can engage and disengage with discrete moralities. By employing concepts such as “coalition enforcement”, “moral bubbles”, “cognitive niches”, “overmoralization”, “military intelligence” and so on, the book aims to spell out how perpetrators and victims of violence systematically disagree about the very nature of violence. The author’s original claim is that disagreement can be understood naturalistically, described by an account of morality also informed by evolutionary perspectives.

Content Level » Research

Keywords » Morality - Religion - Understanding Violence - Violence

Related subjects » Applied Ethics & Social Responsibility - Computational Intelligence and Complexity - Epistemology & Philosophy of Science


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Re-assessing ecology of tool transparency in epistemic practices