What Counts as Human?

Presented with Carnegie Nexus, as part of the Strange Times series.

Illah Nourbakhsh, professor of robotics at CMU and director of Pittsburgh’s CREATE Lab, asks us to consider: “What if we become so manipulable... that we’re the robots?” He poses this and other provocative questions in this interdisciplinary triple bill that brings literature, philosophy, and technology studies together to consider the human as an agent of mimicry and self-alienation by way of—and despite—technological advances.

Nourbakhsh is joined by Christopher Fynsk, Maurice Blanchot chair and dean of the philosophy and critical theory division of the European Graduate School, and Ursula Heise, professor of literary studies at UCLA and co-founder of its Lab for Environmental Narrative Strategies (LENS).