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Director of Graduate Programs
Assistant Professor
School
of Media Studies
The
New School
Affiliated Scholar
Center for
Internet and Society
Stanford Law School
Co-Founder and Vice-Chair
International Committee for Robot Arms Control
(ICRAC)
Recent Media
Appearences:
[listen to my Los Angeles NPR
interview with Ron Arkin]
[listen to
my Pennsylvania NPR interview with Ron Arkin]
[listen
to my Pacifica Radio interview with Red Whittaker]
[listen
to my Voice of Russia, American Edition interview]
[watch
my Faultlines interview on Al Jazeera English]
[watch my
Lateline interview on ABC]
About me:
Dr. Peter Asaro is a philosopher of science, technology and media. His work examines the interfaces between social relations, human minds and bodies, artificial intelligence and robotics, and digital media.
His current research focuses on the social, cultural, political, legal and ethical dimensions of military robotics and UAV drones, from a perspective that combines media theory with science and technology studies. He has written widely-cited papers on lethal robotics from the perspective of just war theory and human rights. Dr. Asaro's research also examines agency and autonomy, liability and punishment, and privacy and surveillance as it applies to consumer robots, industrial automation, smart buildings, and autonomous vehicles. His research has been published in international peer reviewed journals and edited volumes, and he is currently writing a book that interrogates the intersections between military robotics, interface design practices, and social and ethical issues.
Dr. Asaro has held research positions at the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers University, the HUMlab of Umeå University in Sweden, and the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna. He has also developed technologies in the areas of virtual reality, data visualization and sonification, human-computer interaction, computer-supported cooperative work, artificial intelligence, machine learning, robot vision, and neuromorphic robotics at the National Center for Supercomputer Applications (NCSA), the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, and Iguana Robotics, Inc., and was involved in the design of the natural language interface for the Wolfram|Alpha computational knowledge engine (winner of the 2010 SXSW Web Interactive Award for Technical Achievement), for Wolfram Research.
He is currently working on an Oral History of Robotics project that is funded by the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society and the National Endowment for the Humanities Office of Digital Humanities.
Dr. Asaro received his PhD in the History, Philosophy and Sociology of Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he also earned a Master of Arts from the Department of Philosophy, and a Master of Computer Science from the Department of Computer Science.
Representative work:
(2001) Love Machine
(2011) "A Body to Kick,
but Still No Soul to Damn: Legal Perspectives on Robotics"
(2011) "Remote-Control Crimes:
Roboethics and Legal Jurisdictions of Tele-Agency"
(2009) "Military
Robotics and Just War Theory"
(2009) "Modeling the
Moral User: Designing Ethical Interfaces for Tele-Operation"
(2009) "Special Issue on the Intellectual Legacy of W. Ross Ashby, Int.
Journal of General Systems"
(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"
Contact me:
