For Episode 13, I am joined by Dr. Samir Chopra to talk about intelligent robots, personhood, the complicated machinations of human grieving, and “Be Right Back” (Season 2, Episode 1 of Black Mirror), which first premiered in 2013.
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My special guest for Episode 13, Samir Chopra, is Professor of Philosophy at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His academic interests include pragmatism, Nietzsche, the philosophical foundations of artificial intelligence, and the politics and ethics of technology, Chopra is a certified philosophical counselor and blogs regularly at samirchopra.com. He also tweets at @EyeOnThePitch.
Samir and I “met” several years ago when we were both writing for the NewAPPS philosophy blog. Although we had never met IRL, I have always admired Samir’s writing and thinking, so I was especially pleased to discover, in the course of our podcast conversation, that he is every bit as interesting and engaging as I imagined!
You can listen to the entirety of our conversation here:
Here at BLACK MIRROR REFLECTIONS, we assume that everyone is already committed to read more, write more, think more, and be more… so here’s a helpful list of links to thinkers, technologies, books, and articles referenced in this episode:
- Samir Chopra and Lawrence F. White, A Legal Theory for Autonomous Artificial Agents (University of Michigan Press, 2011)
- Samir Chopra and Scott D. Dexter, Decoding Liberation: The Promise of Free and Open Source Software (Routledge, 2007)
- Samir Chopra, “Social Media and The Training of our Minds” (3 Quarks Daily, 2017)
- Leigh M. Johnson, “Someone Like You: On Black Mirror‘s ‘Be Right Back'”
- Leibniz on the identity of discernibles
- Adam Thierer, “Is It “Techno-Chauvinist: and “Anti-Humanist” to Believe in the Transformational Potential of Technology?” (Medium, 2018)
- Leigh M. Johnson, “Why You Should Case that Artificial Intelligence Can Lie” (Part 1 and Part 2)
- Resource for understanding what philosophers mean by “epistemic standing”
- Hilary Putnam, “Machines or Artificially Created Life?” (Journal of Philosophy, 1964)
- Isaac Asimov, I, Robot (The Robot Series)
- Daniel Dennett, “Why and How Does Consciousness Seem the Way it Seems?” (2015)
Comment section is open!