#66 — Living with Robots

Making Sense with Sam Harris

Waking Up with Sam Harris

Samharris, Currentevents, Politics, Ethics, Religion, Neuroscience, Science, Society & Culture, Philosophy

4.6 • 29.1K Ratings

🗓️ 1 March 2017

⏱️ 25 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sam Harris speaks with Kate Darling about the ethical concerns surrounding our increasing use of robots and other autonomous systems.

Kate Darling is a leading expert in robot ethics. She’s a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab, where she investigates social robotics and conducts experimental studies on human-robot interaction. Kate is also a fellow at the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet & Society and the Yale Information Society Project, and is an affiliate at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. She explores the emotional connection between people and life-like machines, seeking to influence technology design and public policy. Her writing and research anticipate difficult questions that lawmakers, engineers, and the wider public will need to address as human-robot relationships evolve in the coming decades. Kate has a background in law & economics and intellectual property.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're
0:12.1	hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing
0:16.2	the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense
0:20.7	Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharis.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed
0:26.1	to add to your favorite pod catcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads
0:31.2	on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers.
0:35.8	So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one.
0:46.8	For today's podcast, I bring you Kate Darling. What a great name. Kate is a researcher at the MIT
0:54.5	Media Lab and a fellow at the Harvard Berkman Center. She focuses on the way technology is influencing
1:01.2	society, specifically robot technology. But her background is in law and in the social sciences.
1:09.2	She's one of the few people paying attention to this, and this is along with AI going to become
1:14.0	increasingly interesting to us as we integrate more and more autonomous systems into our lives.
1:20.8	I really enjoyed speaking with Kate. We get into some edgy territory. As I think I said at some point,
1:27.3	the phrase, child size sex robots was not one that I was ever planning to say on the podcast. Much
1:35.4	less consider its implications, but we live in a strange world, and it appears to be getting stranger.
1:42.1	So to help us all figure that out, I now bring you Kate Darling.
1:53.8	I am here with Kate Darling. Kate, thanks for coming on the podcast.
1:57.3	I'm delighted to be here. It's great to be able to do this. I'm continually amazed that we
2:02.2	can do this given the technology. But I first learned of you, I think in a New Yorker article on
2:08.0	robot ethics. This is your area of focus and expertise. This is an area that almost doesn't exist.
2:16.4	You're one of the few people focusing on this. So perhaps just take a moment to say how you got
2:22.0	into this. Yeah, robot ethics is it is kind of a new field and it sounds really
	...

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