Photo of Dr. Sylvester JohnsonThe Lafayette Humanities Center hosted Dr. Sylvester Johnson of Virginia Tech University for a virtual visit on April 21, 2021. Dr. Johnson, the founding director of the Virginia Tech Center for Humanities, offered a thought-provoking lecture and discussion about the relationship between, and the seemingly imminent convergence of, artificial intelligence and the concept of humanness. He posits that before society will need to grapple with the notion of intelligent machines becoming human, there will be a need to answer the question of whether or not people that have been augmented by artificial intelligence can lose their humanness. Watch the full lecture and Q&A session below.

Dr. Johnson’s visit to campus was sponsored by the Lafayette Humanities Center, the Office of the Provost, the Philosophy Department, the Religious Studies department, and the Cyril S. Lang ’49 Center for the Humanities Endowment Fund.