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Can a Robot be a Good Colleague? A Conversation with Sven Nyholm and Shadan Sadeghian

    Join us for a CHIWORK conversation on January 26 at 11am EST. Click here: Download Calendar Invite

    “Can a robot be a good colleague? Revisiting the Question”: Back in 2020, my colleague Jilles Smids and I published a paper about whether a robot could live up to the ideal of being a good colleague. While many HTI researchers have investigated the psychology of human-robot interaction in the workplace, there had been very little analysis within philosophy about whether it makes sense to think of a robot as a colleague before our paper came out. Notably, there had also been very little philosophical work, more generally, about what it is be a good colleague. In 2021, however, the philosophers Monika Betzler and Jörg Löschke published an interesting philosophy paper about what they call collegial relationships and the values associated with collegiality. In my presentation, I will revisit the question that Smids and I asked about whether robots can be good colleagues, and I will relate our argument to the ideas presented by Betzler and Löschke.

    Speaker: Sven Nyholm

    Associate Professor at Utrecht University

    Sven Nyholm is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. He is also a member of the Ethics Advisory Board of the Human Brain Project and an Associate Editor of the journal Science and Engineering Ethics. His current research focuses on the ethics of artificial intelligence. His publications include the books Humans and Robots: Ethics, Agency, and Anthropomorphism (Rowman & Littlefield 2020) and This is Technology Ethics: An Introduction (Wiley-Blackwell, 2023).

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