The lecture was entitled The Culture of Enhancement. On Robots, Cyborgs, and Other Persons The lector, Dr. Dieter Sturma is a professor of philosophy at the Bonn University.

Some points from the lecture:

An human being as a representative of a biological species and a person can be approached differently.

Technically, everybody who wears glasses, implants or other technological aids is a cyborg. How many alien parts should a man have to become non-human? 200 is normal today. A million? More? We cannot have a limit like this.

When creating robots humans have slaves in mind. Asimo is just a walking battery, but should robots gain personality then slavering them would be unacceptable.

My thoughts:

1. In educational technology, research has proved that human feedback in multimedia study materials has advantages over automated feedback. But if we give the choice to students, they would choose automated feedback. Is that because of the poor level of the current “artificial intelligence” or rather because of the fair to show one’s stupidity to another person? Being stupid and feeling shame is something that only a person is capable of (according to today’s lecture).

2. My children watch The Cars, Pelle the Police Car, The Little Rescue Boat Elias etc. All these animated movies have machines talking and acting like persons. But when the children go on the street they don’t expect a car to talk. More evidence to the fact that “real” experience convinces more than any multimedia presentation?

3. An addition to the thick list of features that helps us to distinct humans from other biogical species – generosity, willingness to share. There are even theories that argue that generosity was the trigger to human evolution.