About me:

I am a philosopher of technology. My work includes academic scholarship, documentary film making, and technological and artistic projects.

My interests focus on natural and synthetic brains, and their relationships with and through computational, information and media technologies. In addition to my continuing work on the history of cybernetics and brain modeling, I am studying how contemporary science and technology address the relationships between the brain, ideas, the mental self and culture. My latest project examines the ethics of designing autonomous systems, and the nature of agency and responsibility in distributed socio-technical systems. This work extends my interests in engineering ethics and participatory design, social and emotional robotics, and new media communication technologies, and is initially focusing on the use of robotics for police and military applications.

Representative work:
(2001) Love Machine
(2008) "How Just Could a Robot War Be?"
(2008) "Pornomechanics: Sex Robots and the Mechanisms of Love"
(2008) "From Mechanisms of Adaptation to Intelligence Amplifiers: The Philosophy of W. Ross Ashby"
(2007) "Heinz von Foerster and the Bio-Computing Movements of the 1960s"
(2007) "Robots and Responsibility from a Legal Perspective"
(2006) "What Should We Want from a Robot Ethic?"
(2006) "Working Models and the Synthetic Method: Electronic Brains as Mediators Between Neurons and Behavior"
(2005) "A.I. and Emotional Robots: Collaborative Fiction in Science and Film"
(2000) "Transforming Society by Transforming Technology: The Science and Politics of Participatory Design"

Currently, I am a member of the faculty of the Department of Media Studies and Film at The New School. This Fall I am teaching "Media Studies: Ideas" for the Master of Arts Program in Media Studies.

I am also an Affiliated Scholar at the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Last year I was a Fellow in Mind and Culture at the Center. In the Spring semester, I taught a course on "Minds, Machines and Persons" for the Department of Philosophy.

My graduate studies were done at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where I received a Master of Arts from the Department of Philosophy, a Master of Computer Science from the Department of Computer Science, and a PhD from the History, Philosophy and Sociology of Science Program in 2006. I was also active in organizing the Graduate Program in Science, Technology, Information and Medicine.

Since completing my PhD, I have been a Fellow at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna, where I made documentary films of the scientific practices of European Space Agency scientists, and designed a gallery exhibit on the impact of space science and satellite technologies on modern life and culture. I was also a Fellow in Digital Humanities at the HUMlab of Umeå University in Sweden.

I have worked at the National Center for Supercomputer Applications (NCSA), the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, and Iguana Robotics, Inc. in the areas of virtual reality, human-computer interaction, computer-supported cooperative work, artificial intelligence, machine learning, robot vision, and neuromorphic robotics. My dissertation was on the relationships between brain modeling, the development of early computers, and cybernetic and cognitive theories of mind in the period from the 1940s to the 1960s. Much of this work focused on the Biological Computer Laboratory at the University of Ilinois (1958-1976) and the cyberneticians W. Ross Ashby and Heinz von Foerster who worked there.

Contact me:

pasaro AT rci.rutgers.edu

Peter Asaro
Center for Cultural Analysis
Rutgers University
8 Bishop Place
New Brunswick, NJ 08901
United States