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Intersections Symposium and Scholars Celebration Featuring Keynote Speaker Sylvester Johnson
April 23, 2021 at 2:00 pm
Intersections Spring Symposium and Intersections Scholars Celebration
Friday, April 23, 2021
2:00 pm to 4:00 pm
Virtual event is free and open to the public. Register here.
In-person attendance is currently limited to Intersections Scholars and Intersections Groups>
Keynote Speaker: Sylvester A. Johnson (Professor and Assistant Vice Provost, Virginia Tech)
“Will Robots Feel Pain? The Politics of Race, the Governance of Technology, and the Future of Humanity”
From Aristotle’s ancient conception of the soul, to Ibn Rushd’s 12th-century analytics of the intellect, to the information theory underlying neural networks, scholars have queried the agency of things and the relationship between matter and its other (spirit?). Does agency inhere in material things? Can an assemblage of machine parts be a person? What distinguishes humans from mere objects? In this talk, Sylvester Johnson proposes that the use of intelligent machines (in the form of artificial intelligence or machine-learning applications) for human enhancement has crystallized these age-old conundrums in a new key. Machines are now being successfully engineered to write poetry, compose music, make moral decisions, and even program other machines. More importantly, military efforts to combine humans with intelligent machines are beginning to produce far-reaching consequences that move beyond scenarios that pit mere humans against mere machines. By considering the racial history of so-called fetishism, Johnson gives historical depth to contemporary developments in cybernetics and discusses the prospect of new frameworks for humans and non-humans that may create new possibilities of machine life.
Sylvester A. Johnson, the founding director of the Virginia Tech Center for Humanities, is a nationally recognized humanities scholar specializing in the study of technology, race, religion, and national security. He is also assistant vice provost for the humanities at Virginia Tech and executive director of the university’s Tech for Humanity initiative. Johnson, who holds a faculty appointment in the Department of Religion and Culture, has authored The Myth of Ham in Nineteenth-Century American Christianity, a study of race and religious hatred that won the American Academy of Religion’s Best First Book award; and African American Religions, 1500-2000, an award-winning interpretation of five centuries of democracy, colonialism, and freedom in the Atlantic world. Johnson has also co-edited The FBI and Religion: Faith and National Security Before and After 9/11. A founding co-editor of the Journal of Africana Religions, he has published more than 70 scholarly articles, essays, and reviews.
This Intersections Spring Symposium keynote is also part of the UF Center for Humanities and the Public Sphere 2020-21 speaker series Rethinking the Public Sphere Part II: Data & Democracy.
This event is free and open to the public. Email humanities-center@ufl.edu for more information.
This event is organized by the UF Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere in partnership with George A. Smathers Libraries with support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.