Donoho Colloquium
Andy Clark, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK, and Macquarie University, NSW, Australia
POSTPONED, new event date TBA
Filene Auditorium, Moore Hall - Dartmouth College
Cyborg Minds in Designer Worlds
We are entering an age of widespread human enhancement. The technologies range from wearable, implantable, and pervasive computing, to new forms of onboard sensing, thought-controlled equipment, personal Artificial Intelligences, intelligent prosthetic limbs, humble but transformative waves of smartphones, and the humanly engineered landscapes of augmented, virtual, and mixed realities. Courtesy of this tidal swell of self-creation, we should start to recognize ourselves not as neatly bounded biological organisms but as repeatedly reconfigurable nodes in a flux of innovation and reinvention. This increasing fluidity brings new opportunities, but new challenges too. It has implications for law, social policy, education, and human rights. But above all, it gives us a new opportunity to look at ourselves, and to ask the fundamental question: Where does the human mind stop, and the rest of the world begin?
Biography
Andy Clark is Professor of Cognitive Philosophy at the University of Sussex. He is the author of several books including Natural-Born Cyborgs (Oxford University Press 2003), Supersizing the Mind (Oxford University Press 2008) and Surfing Uncertainty (Oxford University Press, 2016). His current research interests include human-technology interaction, embodiment, and the predictive brain.