About this event
Technomoral Conversations is a “fireside chat” event focused on intimate relationships with and through machines. Can a person have a deeply meaningful relationship with a robot or AI chatbot? Could an app help enrich and support your relationship with your life partner? How are our feelings and interactions affected when there is a machine mediating between ourselves and a person we care about and/or for? This conversation will explore how we can navigate the complexities of technologies that are entangled with our relationships and our emotions.
Speaker biographies
Professor Jacqui Gabb, Chief Relationships Officer at Paired
Jacqui Gabb is professor of Sociology and Intimacy at The Open University. She has completed externally-funded research on couple relationships, sex, intimacy and sexuality, and relationships and sex education (RSE). Building upon her award-winning Enduring Love? study, she worked with a start-up tech company to develop Paired, which is now the global #1 couple relationship app. Her current research is pioneering conceptual tools to examine contemporary relationship quality and digital intimacies.
Kate Darling, Author and Research Scientist at MIT Media Lab
Dr. Kate Darling is a Research Scientist at the MIT Media Lab and author of The New Breed: What Our History with Animals Reveals about Our Future with Robots. Kate’s work looks at the near-term effects of robotic technology, with a particular interest in law, social, and ethical issues. She runs experiments, holds workshops, writes, and speaks about some of the more interesting developments in the world of human-robot interaction, and where we might find ourselves in the future.
Professor Andrew McStay, Professor of Technology & Society and Director of the Emotional AI Lab at Bangor University
Andrew McStay is Professor of Technology & Society at Bangor University, UK. His most recent book ‘Optimising Emotions, Incubating Falsehoods’ (Springer 2022) examines the impact of technologies that make use of data about affective and emotional life on politics. His forthcoming book ‘Automating Empathy’ (OUP 2023) considers systems that pertain to feel-into everyday life. His latest papers have considered ethics, artificial personalities and Metaverse developments. Director of Emotional AI Lab, current projects include cross-cultural social analysis of emotional AI in UK and Japan, biometrics and policing, children and emotoys, and work with the Welsh Government on data ethics in public services. Non-academic work includes IEEE membership of various IEEE groups (P7000, 7030, 7700), W3C on interoperability in the Metaverse, and ongoing advising roles for start-ups, NGOs and UK policy bodies.
Professor Shannon Vallor (Chair), Director of the Centre for Technomoral Futures
Shannon Vallor is the Baillie Gifford Chair in the Ethics of Data and Artificial Intelligence at the Edinburgh Futures Institute (EFI) at the University of Edinburgh, where she is also appointed in Philosophy. Professor Vallor's research explores how new technologies, especially AI, robotics, and data science, reshape human moral character, habits, and practices. Her work includes advising policymakers and industry on the ethical design and use of AI. She is a Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute, and currently chairs Scotland's Data Delivery Group.
Please note this is a hybrid event. Streaming will be live captioned.