Dr. Katleen Gabriels

Thursday, December 5, 3:15 Engleman A120

Abstract: Google’s search engine, Facebook’s News Feed, Amazon’s Echo: many of our everyday technologies contain Artificial Intelligence (AI). Autonomous robotic vacuum cleaners and robot lawn mowers help us at home, robotic surgical systems perform operations, and therapy chatbots such as Woebot are always ready to ‘listen’. We can even delegate moral decision making to Artificial Moral Agents.   The combination of robots and AI leads to numerous possibilities, which, in turn, also raise compelling ethical questions. Which decisions do we delegate to machines and which preferably not? And how and from ‘whom’ do self-learning AI systems actually learn?

Dr. Katleen Gabriels is a moral philosopher, specialized in computer ethics. She works as an Assistant Professor at Maastricht University, The Netherlands. She researches the relations and co-shapings between morality and contemporary technologies.  In October, her new book on technology ethics was published; the English version will be published early 2020 (Rules for Robots. Ethics & Artificial Intelligence, VUBPRESS).

Contact: Richard Volkman, volkmanr1@southernct.edu