Are Friends Electric? Our Future Lives with Robots

The BCS Edinburgh Branch Sidney Michaelson Memorial Lecture (about Sidney Michaelson)

In partnership with the Edinburgh International Science Festival.

Saturday 31st March 2018, 15:00 pm - 16:30 pm

Speaker: Prof Tony Prescott, Director of Sheffield Robotics

Venue: Auditorium, National Museum of Scotland.

Tickets for this event must be purchased from the EISF here

Synopsis

From books and TV to movies and games, our lives are full of images of our possible future lives with robots - some appealing, some nightmarish, some simply weird. What might future robots be like and might we want to be friends with them? Why are we so fascinated with robots anyway, and what does this tell us about ourselves? Join Prof Tony Prescott, psychologist, neuroscientist, and director of Sheffield Robotics, to explore how far we've come in creating the robots of our science fiction dreams, where we might get to in the future, and whether all of this is really such a good idea.

This event is dedicated to Prof Sidney Michaelson (1925-1991), a champion of computer science

About the speaker

Prof Tony Prescott (http://www.abrg.group.shef.ac.uk/people/tony/) is Professor of Cognitive Robotics at the University of Sheffield, and Director of Sheffield Robotics, a cross-disciplinary research institute with over one hundred researchers. He is the co-creator of the animal-like robots Scratchbot and Shrewbot. He also writes and speaks about the societal and cultural impacts of future robotic, AI, virtual reality and telepresence systems, with particular focus on how these technologies are changing how we see ourselves.