Notes from the Electronic Cottage 7/20/17

Producer/Host: Jim Campbell

The world of autonomous machines is rapidly approaching. From self-driving vehicles to completely automated fast food establishments to robots in the operating room to weapons that decide what is a target and destroy it with no human intervention, machines are going to have an autonomy they have never had before in human history. And that means our ethical and legal systems are going to have to raise and answer questions that we have never had to answer before. Unfortunately, our ethical and legal capacities seem to be way behind our technological ones. We need to think about what that means. Here’s a start.