John Durham Peters 

March 11, 2025 5:30 PM

Campus Instructional Facility, Room 4025

Considering Forgiveness in a Time of Ubiquitous Recording

The notion of the book of life—out of which the actions of people will be recorded for eventual judgment--has a long history in Jewish and Christian thought.  Digital media revive this notion in strange ways.  Both in journalistic coverage and everyday life, there is now a striking level of detailed judgment about the minutiae of nonverbal and nonpublic expression.  Cameras caught!  Microphones picked up!  Celebrity X or Athlete Y breaks silence!  What does this incessant documentation mean for the possibility of forgiveness and also forgetfulness (which of course is not exactly the same thing)?

About the Speaker:

John Durham Peters teaches and writes on media history and theory. He taught at the University of Iowa between 1986-2016. He is the author of Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (1999), Courting the Abyss: Free Speech and the Liberal Tradition (2005), The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (2015), and most recently, Promiscuous Knowledge: Information, Image, and Other Truth Games in History (2020), with the late Kenneth Cmiel. He is working on a media history of weather.

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Antón Barba-Kay

March 25, 2025 5:30 PM

Campus Instructional Facility, Room 4025

Time Change

We live in an age of hyper-awareness of generational differences. Digital technology accelerates our sense of time in a way that both undermines traditional age categories (like "child" or "elder") and hypes up differences between new categories (like "Gen Alpha" and "Boomer").  On the one hand, one's age matters less than ever--everyone is the same age online. And this has put pressure on longstanding ways of establishing the authority of adults over children. On the other hand, the divergences in sensibility and upbringing between an average Boomer and a Gen Zer are likely the largest ever to have been expressed within one human lifespan. It is not new that people should feel that their children are very different from them, but it's plain that these differences have nonetheless continued to accelerate. What are the ultimate consequences of this disorienting acceleration? What does it teach us about the nature of time itself? How can we take our time again?

About the Speaker:

Antón Barba-Kay is a Distinguished Fellow at the Center on Privacy & Technology. He is also Senior Fellow at the Institute for Practical Ethics at UC San Diego. He was formerly an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Catholic University and Robert Aird Chair of Humanities at Deep Springs College. In addition to his scholarly publications in nineteenth-century German philosophy, his essays about culture and technology have appeared in The New Republic, The Hedgehog Review, and The Point, among other magazines. A Web of Our Own Making–his book about what the internet is and what a difference it makes–was published in 2023 by Cambridge University Press. He earned B.A.’s at St. John’s College and the University of Cambridge, as well as a Ph.D. from the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.

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Christine Rosen

April 16, 2025 5:30 PM

Campus Instructional Facility, Room 3025

Defending the Human in a Technological World

What does it mean to be human in a world that promises near-endless opportunities for virtual, disembodied experience? What crucial human skills and habits of mind are deteriorating or disappearing now that we spend most of our time staring at screens? If we can design machines that mimic human intelligence, what does that portend for the humanities and for human creativity? Technology promises us many things, but we must also reckon with what is lost when we choose mediated, rather than embodied, experiences, and when we outsource to machines the fundamental challenges that were once the province of human reason, human emotion, and human conscience.

About the Speaker:

Christine Rosen is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where she focuses on American history, society and culture, technology and culture, and feminism. Concurrently she is a columnist for Commentary magazine and one of the cohosts of The Commentary Magazine Podcast. She is also a fellow at the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture and a senior editor in an advisory position at the New Atlantis.

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Paul Scherz

April 22, 2025 5:30 PM

Campus Instructional Facility, Room 4025

Risk, AI, and the Ethics of Precision Medicine

AI and genetic technologies are rapidly changing the landscape of medical practice. In the emerging field of precision medicine, AI integrates data from genetic sequence and health records to identify risk factors. The hope is that these risk factors are then incorporated into an all-encompassing plan to prevent future disease. This talk examines the effects that this new intensive focus on risk might have on medicine. It discusses the dangers that patients' experience of health might disappear into anxiety over risk, how the integration of AI tools into the clinical encounter might change clinical judgment, and why these uses of AI might intensify the growing problems of overdiagnosis and overtreatment. It also suggests ways to implement AI that avoid these ethical problems.

About the Speaker:

Paul Scherz is the Our Lady of Guadalupe Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame. His work examines the intersection of theology, science, medicine, and technology. His interests in ethics center on the role of virtue ethics, especially Stoic virtue ethics, in moral theology. He has published articles on many topics in bioethics, such as human enhancement, genetic technology, and end of life ethics. His books analyze issues like the moral formation of scientists, the role of risk in contemporary practical reason, the ethics of precision medicine, and the ethics of artificial intelligence.