In 2015, two chimpanzees in New York were granted “legal person status” by a court ruling. In 2017, a humanoid robot named SOPHIA was granted citizenship by the Saudi Arabia government. These actions have potentially groundbreaking implications in the field of medical and robot ethics. Join Patricia Vargas, roboethicist and director of the robotics laboratory at Heriot-Watt University as she explores the rights of the machine and whether robots could be ever ethical.
Patricia Vargas is the founder director of the Robotics Laboratory and associate professor/reader in Computer Science and Robotics at the School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences at Heriot–Watt University in Edinburgh. She is an executive associate of the Edinburgh Centre for Robotics. Among her many research interests are evolutionary and bio-inspired robotics, swarm robotics, computational neuroscience, data mining and machine learning, human–robot interaction and rehabilitation robotics.
Following the talk there will be the opportunity to meet with Dr. Patricia Vargas.
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