What Should Care Robots Care About?

August 6, 2020

7pm — Virtual

Time:
August 6: 4:00 a.m. PDT (GMT -7)
August 6: 7:00 p.m. (GMT+8)

Language:
Chinese only, no translation

Streaming platform:
Tencent Meeting: https://meeting.tencent.com/s/aUD5LO7E291B
Meeting ID: 612 479 122

Or watch the livestream by clicking: https://meeting.tencent.com/l/s85lAenYQayy

About:
This seminar will attempt to reflect on the ethical consequences of care robots and our response strategies, from the levels of physical existence, social resources, data carriers, and artificial agents. We will take intelligent artificial limbs and robot pets as examples to think about how we can live with care robots in the future.

Key Discussions:

• What will be the ethical consequences of care robots?
• How should we deal with these ethical consequences?
• How should humans live together with care robots in the future?

Presenter:

WU Tianyue

• Tenured Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Peking University
• Berggruen Fellow

Wu Tianyue has long devoted himself to reconstructing the philosophical arguments of ancient and medieval historical texts as a way of exploring new intellectual resources for present day reflection. His current focus is the philosophy of mind and ethics in the ancient and medieval Aristotelian traditions. Wu is the author of Voluntas et libertas: A Philosophical Account of Augustine’s Conception of the Will in the Domain of Moral Psychology (意愿与自由：奥古斯丁意愿概念的道德心理学解读, Peking University Press, 2010). More than ten related English language papers have been published in Les Recherches de Théologie et Philosophie Médiévales, Modern Schoolman, Review of Metaphysics, Oxford Studies in Medieval Philosophy, and other international academic journals. While working at the Peking University Berggruen Research Center, Wu will focus on “The Philosophy of Body and Bioethical Challenges of Frontier Technologies”. Against a backdrop of increasingly grave ethical challenges facing emerging technologies, Wu aims to rethink “the body”, an ontological concept that has not received enough attention in recent discussions.

Moderator:

DUAN Weiwen

• Professor, Institute of Philosophy, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS)
• Director of the Research Center for Science, Technology and Society, CASS

composed by Arswain
machine learning consultation by Anna Tskhovrebov
commissioned by the Berggruen Institute
premiered at the Bradbury Building
downtown Los Angeles
april 22, 2022

Human perception of what sounds “beautiful” is necessarily biased and exclusive. If we are to truly expand our hearing apparatus, and thus our notion of beauty, we must not only shed preconceived sonic associations but also invite creative participation from beings non-human and non-living. We must also begin to cede creative control away from ourselves and toward such beings by encouraging them to exercise their own standards of beauty and collaborate with each other.

Movement I: Alarm Call
‘Alarm Call’ is a long-form composition and sound collage that juxtaposes, combines, and manipulates alarm calls from various human, non-human, and non-living beings. Evolutionary biologists understand the alarm call to be an altruistic behavior between species, who, by warning others of danger, place themselves by instinct in a broader system of belonging. The piece poses the question: how might we hear better to broaden and enhance our sense of belonging in the universe? Might we behave more altruistically if we better heed the calls of – and call out to – non-human beings?

Using granular synthesis, biofeedback, and algorithmic modulation, I fold the human alarm call – the siren – into non-human alarm calls, generating novel “inter-being” sonic collaborations with increasing sophistication and complexity. 

Movement II: A.I.-Truism
A synthesizer piece co-written with an AI in the style of Vangelis’s Blade Runner score, to pay homage to the space of the Bradbury Building.

Movement III: Alarmism
A machine learning model “learns” A.I.Truism and recreates Alarm Call, generating an original fusion of the two.

Movement IV: A.I. Call
A machine learning model “learns” Alarm Call and recreates A.I.Truism, generating an original fusion of the two.

RAVE (IRCAM 2021) https://github.com/acids-ircam/RAVE