The following is the unpublished transcript of a talk I presented over two years ago at the Festival/filosofia in Modena, Italy. Written before the latest generation of humanoid robots (including Elon Musk’s laughable Optimus, slated to “replace human workers on the factory floor”), I would stand by the core argument that it makes about the urgency of overcoming anthropocentric models of thought, whether in the humanities (humanities without humans) or technology fields (robotics). It was…
 
Read more

I recently had the honor of delivering one of the keynote addresses at the 2020 festivalfilosofia in Modena, Italy, one of Europe’s leading idea festivals. This year’s theme was the machine and the machine at the center of my talk was the robot understood in humanoid terms. Under the title of Let Robots Be Robots! I called instead for a non-anthropocentric ontology for robotic agents. The opening section of the talk ran as follows: In the…
 
Read more