With David Lawrence of Newcastle University.

In the future, we may truly make our own match – creating, or causing to be created, beings that could be considered persons just like us. Whether through gene editing, synthetic biology, or even artificial intelligence, we need to think seriously about how to treat these lifeforms. This talk will consider how future beings — intelligent androids, synthezoids, even alternate-substrate sentiences – might fit alongside the ‘baseline’ human and ask whether these alternate beings ought to be considered different to us, and why this may or may not matter in terms of a notion of ‘human community’. The film Blade Runner, concerned in large part with humanity and its key synthezoid antagonist Roy Batty, offers a frame for this discussion.

Organised by the NI Ethics Forum.