Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 17, No. 441.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
www.princeton.edu/humanist/
Submit to: humanist@princeton.edu
Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2003 10:12:43 +0000
From: MADCT <madct@kcl.ac.uk>
Subject: Digital Scholarship, Digital Culture
You are invited to a public lecture in the series:
DIGITAL SCHOLARSHIP, DIGITAL CULTURE
Yorick Wilks, (Professor of Computer Science, University of Sheffield)
'Companions: Explorations in Machine Personality'
What kind and level of personality should be in a machine agent so as to be
acceptable to a human user, more particularly to one who may fear
technology and have no experience of it? The Tamagotchi phenomenon showed
that a simple, indeed trivial, machine could cause millions to treat it as
if it had a personality and to feel guilty if they failed to "feed" it. The
core of this question is the psychology of the attribution of human
characteristics to artefacts, a quite different matter from the
philosophical question of whether artefacts can reasonably be said to
possess such properties.
What levels of responsibility and legal attribution for responsibility can
we expect or desire from entities like web agents in the near future? We
might well soon find the courts deciding that a machine could be
responsible, to a limited degree, in the sense that a domestic animal can
be responsible for its behaviour, whereas ferae naturae, like tigers, never
are in common law, no matter what they do, and only their owners remain
responsible for their acts. Dogs have some form of character in law, good
or bad, and it may become possible, or even necessary, to view the actions
of Companions in this way before very long.
17.30 Thursday 11th December 2003
Arthur & Paula Lucas Lecture Theatre (Room 2B18)
Strand Building, Strand Campus
King's College London
All are invited to a reception following the lecture
Further information regarding this lecture series can be found at -
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/seminar/03-04/index.html
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, Room 11bb,
King's College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS
Tel: +44 20 7848 2371
Fax: +44 20 7848 2980
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