Join the Schwartz Reisman community for a lively discussion on a fiction story about artificial romance. A young man who wants a fake girlfriend to get his parents off his back finds the fake relationship has consequences he hadn’t anticipated. We will examine the consequences that result when chatbots become good enough to turn to for our emotional needs, and even for relationships. 

Join the Schwartz Reisman community for a lively discussion on Cory Doctorow’s “Car Wars,” a short story that discusses the ethics of self-driving cars and the unspoken assumption that it should not be up to the driver what ethics, and hence what software, their self-driving car runs. For the optional companion piece, we’ll look at an argument in favour of mandatory ethics systems in self-driving cars.

Join us for a discussion on the opacity and seeming arbitrariness of AI algorithms, the fragility of modern supply chains due computerized inventory management, and worries about how technology is changing jobs. Schwartz Reisman postdoctoral fellow Benjamin Wald facilitates a biweekly discussion of issues in AI by using fiction—films, TV shows, short stories—to deepen our ability imagine possible futures that already confront us.

How might technology, and specifically AI, perform care labour like childrearing? Join Schwartz Reisman postdoctoral fellow Benjamin Wald as he facilitates a biweekly discussion of issues in AI by using fiction—films, TV shows, short stories—to deepen our ability imagine possible futures that already confront us. In this session, we'll read a short story about robot nannies taking over large parts of childcare which raises interesting questions about these topics.

How might technology, and specifically the ability to organize and search through the data of our own lives, transform our sense of self and relation to one another? Join us for a discussion of issues in AI by using fiction—films, TV shows, short stories—to deepen our ability imagine possible futures that already confront us. In this session, we'll read Ted Chiang's short story "The truth of fact, the truth of feeling,” and consider the implications of recording and literacy about oneself.

Remotely piloted drones are already reshaping the way that wars are fought. What happens when the humans are cut out of the loop entirely? Join us for a conversation about a piece of short fiction that asks: what are the ethics of using autonomous drones, the ethics we should program into such drones, and what thinking about such weapons might teach us about our own relationship to the ethics of war?

The Schwartz Reisman Media Club is a bi-weekly meeting series in which we take a piece of fiction—short story, film, TV show—as a jumping-off point for a casual conversation about challenging issues at the intersection of technology and the human world. Our ongoing theme for the next few meetings of the Media Club is “AI and the popular imagination,” focusing on how fictional accounts of AI and data can spark discussion about the roles of AI in our own world.