Terminators: Fact or Fiction?

Movie Screening: Terminator Genisys

Event Featured a Conversation on:

Terminators: Fact or Fiction?

Featured Speakers:

Tom Malinowski
Assistant Secretary of State for
Democracy, Human Rights and Labor

Stuart Russell
Professor of Computer Science and
Smith-Zadeh Professor in Engineering
University of California, Berkeley 

Paul Scharre
Senior Fellow and Director
of the 20YY Warfare Initiative
Center for a New American Security

Missy Ryan
Pentagon Correspondent
The Washington Post

About the Event
Recently, Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and over 1,000 AI and robotics experts called for a ban on autonomous weapons – potential future weapons that would decide on their own who to kill. For the past two years, the U.S. government has been engaged in international discussions on autonomous weapons. Malinowski and Russell have spearheaded these efforts in the U.S. government and the scientific community, and will talk about key questions to address moving forward. What is line between human and machine decision-making? Should robots be allowed to decide who lives and dies on the battlefield?

Scientists and policymakers are grappling with these real-world challenges today, but science fiction shapes how we think about the future, and no franchise has shaped the public perception of “killer robots” more than the Terminator movies. Following the discussion, we hosted a screening of the latest installment, Terminator: Genisys.