Humans and Their Machines, Machines and Their Humans

Computers that talk back. Cars that navigate for us. Stem cell technology that produces new body parts. Organs, limbs, and pets that need to have their batteries changed. Computers that generate images for epic literature, movies, and music. While our machines grow faster, become more powerful, and seem more independent of us, we become more dependent on them. And, as we create machines that are more complex and flexible, both stranger and more eerily familiar, our creations increasingly raise new questions.

• How does technology reflect, change or recreate humanity?
• What does it mean to live surrounded by, intimate with, and dependent on technology most of us barely understand?
• What do our creations, these new dark mirrors, teach us about what it means to be human?
• What, if anything, is left that makes us special?

These are our questions. What are yours? The First Utah Symposium in Science and Literature will bring together experts from literature, computer science, molecular biology and genetics, robotics, philosophy, psychology, theology, and other disciplines to talk about these questions with each other and with interested members of the public. Join us at the first Utah Symposium in Science and Literature to talk with specialists and with others who are curious, willing to learn, and eager to discuss issues raised by the increasingly complex relationship between humans and their machines, machines and their humans.

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