David Brown presents "Are you a Robot?"
David Brown, associate professor of Business and Computer Technology at Pellissippi State Community College, plans to pose a question to those who attend his upcoming lecture: “Are you a robot?”
Brown presents “Are You a Robot? The Question of Our Time,” on Wednesday, Feb. 16, 2-3 p.m. in the Goins Building Auditorium at the Pellissippi Campus, 10915 Hardin Valley Road. His lecture is part of this year’s Faculty Lecture Series, designed to showcase the talents of Pellissippi State faculty. It is free and open to the public.
“After I told Trent Eades, coordinator of the Faculty Lecture Series, the title of my presentation, ‘Are You a Robot?’ he suggested the subtitle ‘The Question of Our Time,’” Brown said. “The more I thought about it, the more I felt that he had hit the nail on the head. This truly is the most important question we face. Are we going to act in the world as human beings, or are we going to allow the robotic elements of society to subsume us?”
“Henry Ford saw his factory techniques as the basis of a social model,” Brown said. “The modern industrial system that has evolved since then has proven to be incredibly efficient at producing material goods cheaply, but industrial technology has been misapplied to areas such as food production and education.”
Industrial technologies, he believes, are sometimes blindly applied in pursuit of higher efficiency and profit at the expense of quality, safety, and natural and human concerns.
“How are humans to compete in an environment in which most of the advantages seem tilted toward machines?” he said.
The last two lectures in this year’s series are also in the Goins Building Auditorium. “Photovoltaics: an Alternative Energy Source” by Ken Swayne, associate professor and program coordinator of the Electrical Engineering concentration in Engineering Technology, is noon-1, March 23.
“Desire and the Exact Sensorial Imagination: the Life and Art of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe” by Annie Gray, associate professor of English, is April 13 at 1 p.m.
For more information about the faculty lectures, contact Trent Eades, (865) 694-6689 or tweades@pstcc.edu. Free parking is available in any lot marked “Open.”