LTC Schieman '03 Presents his Ongoing Research at Seton Hall University

Last semester, the West Point Department of English and Philosophy's LTC Schieman '03 was invited to present his ongoing research in biological approaches to machine ethics at Seton Hall University. The lecture was part of a multi-disciplinary speaker series sponsored by Seton Hall University. The presentation, entitled “Rule-following and the Cognitive Demands of Machine Agency,” argues that the ability to follow abstract rules is necessary for participation in many moral practices (e.g., law, medicine, war) and that this type of rule-following is far more cognitively demanding than we often assume. As a result, LTC Schieman argues that the best source of insight about how to build machines capable of this type of rule-following is not contemporary research in machine learning, but rather, the detailed study of our own brains.