Prior to his talk at the Truly Human? seminar, Robert Sparrow will give a lecture at Aarhus University on October 25. The lecture is open for all, and no registration is needed.

Robert Sparrow (Monash, AUS), Thursday 25^th Oct., 10-12. Building 1453, room 131.

Waymo versus The Terminator: Can one endorse autonomous vehicles without endorsing autonomous weapons?

There is now a flourishing literature on the ethics of “autonomous weapons”, which would be designed to decide whom to kill in wartime. There is also an increasing recognition that autonomous vehicles, such as Waymo’s “Google car”, will need to be capable of deciding who should live or die when there is no way of avoiding killing somebody. In this presentation, I will provide a short assessment of the state of the argument in the literature on both these topics before asking what we might learn from comparing them. In particular, I will ask whether it is possible to endorse the use of autonomous vehicles without endorsing the use of autonomous weapons. By comparing our intuitions about these two cases, I hope to shed light on the obligations we have to both combatants and non-combatants in war and on a hypothesised “right not to be killed by robot”.