Science Night Glasgow : Beyond Human

Robots, prosthetics and the ethics of improving humans. This is our very first Science Night Glasgow, and we honestly couldn't think of a better way to kick off the season! The whole night is about the point where the body ends and the machine begins. We'll start with the history and practice of robotics, then move on to medical robots, bionics, brain-computer interfaces and human augmentation. After that comes the big question the night is named after: what happens when machines start doing things better than we can, and how far should we go in "improving" ourselves? Who's on Nathan Western kicks us off with a talk on designing robotic systems and how they might one day be built into the body. He'll also get into the ethics of cybernetics and body modification, which is where it gets fun. Reachy Mini is hosting our game. It's an open-source desktop robot from Hugging Face and Pollen Robotics, and yes, you can actually have a conversation with it. Patty O'Callaghan gives the second talk. She starts from Asimov's laws of robotics and asks what happens to them once the line between human and machine gets blurry. Kirsty Carlyle closes the night with a demo, which is really a talk with props. She manages the upper-limb bionics portfolio at Össur, and her PhD was on prostheses for partial hand and finger amputations. She's bringing a prosthetic hand wired with electrodes, plus mechanical and silicone prostheses you can pick up and have a proper look at. It's free to come along, and you don't need to know anything about the field. You'll spend the evening inside a nice space with food, drinks, good people to talk to and a robot to poke. I think it's pretty cool, and I really hope you'll come! Every month, a different theme, lots of science, all the fun.