The following is the unpublished transcript of a talk I presented over two years ago at the Festival/filosofia in Modena, Italy.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…
 
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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…
 
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I get interviewed quite a bit as well as doing my fair share of interviewing. Beyond the realm of immediate practice, I have long harbored an interest in dialogue (dialectic) as a mode of philosophical inquiry and puzzled over its relative rarity within the contemporary academy. Perhaps it appears too “unprofessional,” too tainted by the literary and the ludic, the matter of fact and the improvisational, to be taken seriously as a form of scholarship.…
 
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It is often the most modest media that prove successful, adaptable, and resilient over the long term. Such is the case of the podcast, a mode of communication born in the early 2000s, derived from radio, whose monthly US audience has now grown to around 90 million and whose global audience reaches well into the hundreds of millions. Even more striking are the numbers behind the numbers: a content production pipeline, for instance, that counts…
 
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What comes after mobility? Or, rather, what comes after mobility when the word is understood, much as it has been during most of the course of the 20th century, as automobility? According to a manifesto that I wrote in the late summer of 2016, the answer is MOVABILITY. Movability is a word I encountered in the course of research in the Piaggio archives in Pontedera. Apparently coined by an advertising agency in the 1960s, it…
 
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Redundancy has a bad name. Already in antiquity redundantia implied excess: literally, the superabundance of a resource (such as water); figuratively, an overflowing stream of words as in the Ciceronian “illa pro Roscio juvenilis redundantia” (Or. 30: 108). In the era of industry and post-industry, the word retains a ring of inefficiency. If something is redundant, by definition, it is something to be trimmed, something that is misaligned with history’s headlong rush into the future.…
 
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Isaac Asimov’s 1950 classic I, Robot is remembered for many things, but especially for its formulation of the “Three Laws of Robotics”  (sometimes referred to as “Asimov’s Laws”). They run as follows: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. A robot must protect…
 
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It’s easy to poke fun at some of the tics and tropes that have come to define TED over the course of its 32 years of “spreading ideas that matter.” But the fact remains that TED has had an enormous impact and the TED stage is one of the world’s leading communications and innovation platforms, now fully global, interconnected with a multiplicity of television, radio, and web-based channels, and followed by audiences that number in the…
 
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