Among the Robots: Our Relationship With the Nonhuman

Event description

  • Academic events

Among the Robots: Our Relationship with the Nonhuman

What comes to mind when you hear the word "robot"? Perhaps it’s C-3PO and R2-D2, or The Iron Giant, or Wall-E, or any number of other famous friendly robots. Maybe it's The Terminator or HAL 9000 or Roy Batty. You might even make a case for the ancient golems and talking statues of myth, or early automatons like the Mechanical Turk or Tipu’s Tiger. For thousands of years, people have imagined what it might be like to have robots or other autonomous beings of our own creation in the world—but for most of us, the lived experience of "robots" is more mundane: chatbots in customer service and public health, vacuums that run on their own schedules, refrigerators with internet connectivity. What is our relationship with these entities that increasingly surround us, and how might it change in the future?

In this workshop, our speakers will talk about their own experiences designing, refining or otherwise creating digital and robotic entities, sometimes in imaginative, creative work, sometimes for real world applications. What is that we want from our invented workers, helpmates, and companions? How much agency and personality do we want them to have, and how do they figure into our hopes and fears for the future? 

 

ASU Worldbuilding Initiative

Hosted by the Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics, the ASU Worldbuilding Initiative invites all members of our community—at ASU and beyond it—to come together in mutual inspiration, communal thinking, and imaginative play. In each of our workshops, audience members will be encouraged to engage in worldbuilding alongside our guest presenters, inventing new ways of imagining and interacting with the world around us.   

This hybrid event is free and open to the public, in addition to the ASU community. It will be held at the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing on the Tempe Campus and simultaneously livestreamed via Zoom, with full participation in the night's activities possible online or in-person.

Our lecturers for this event will be ASU's Tarah Knaresboro and Matt Bell.

 

Speaker Information

Tarah Knaresboro is a writer, designer, teacher, and dog aficionado from San Jose, California. Prior to pursuing creative writing, she spent a decade designing human-machine interfaces including chatbots, Alexa skills, and IVR (interactive voice response) systems, primarily in the health technology space. Special interests in human-machine communications include advancement of health equity, digital motivation, and digitally-mediated shame reduction. Currently, they teach and write as a 3rd year MFA candidate at ASU, and are at work writing a memoir about their time in women’s mixed martial arts.

 

Matt Bell is the author most recently of the novel Appleseed (a New York Times Notable Book) and the craft book Refuse to Be Done, a guide to novel writing, rewriting, and revision. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Esquire, Tin House, Fairy Tale Review, American Short Fiction, Orion, and many other publications. A native of Michigan, he teaches creative writing at Arizona State University.


This is a hybrid event. To join us virtually via Zoom, choose the "virtual" option on the registration page. Virtual attendees will recieve the Zoom link 24 hours before the event begins.

Event contact

Liz Grumbach
egrumbac@asu.edu
Date

Tuesday, February 18, 2025


Time

5 p.m.6:15 p.m. (MST)

Location

Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing

Cost

Free