Conversations   

New technologies like AI and robots seem to pose utterly unfamiliar questions: if they interact with us like humans, can we also expect them to be moral? Should we feel ethical duties towards them in turn? In fact, the human record suggests some of these problems are quite old. Humans have long treated some non-humans as intelligent or even moral beings in all sorts of ways. What can we learn from this history? What insights into the challenges of new technology does the record offer us?

Webb Keane is a socio-cultural and linguistic anthropologist, who has carried out extensive research in Southeast Asia and elsewhere. His books include Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter and Ethical Life: Its Social and Natural Histories. His newest book, published in 2024, is Animals, Robots, Gods: Adventures in the Moral Imagination.

From antiquity to today, epidemic diseases have devastated nations and their populations. Repeatedly, they have triggered broad ranging consequences for societies—in the economic, social, cultural, religious, and governmental realms. We will use selected epidemics throughout history to illustrate the extent of this epidemic impact and reveal how civilizations not only become vulnerable to epidemics, but also refractory to human efforts to eradicate them.  

Powel Kazanjian is an infectious diseases doctor and medical historian. He has degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, Tufts, and at the University of Michigan, where he is Professor and Chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases and Professor in the Department of History. His medical background and historical training have provided a multidisciplinary approach to his teaching and scholarship. His courses on the “History of Epidemics” and “Sexually Transmitted Diseases” offer students a comprehensive lens to view the impact that infectious diseases have had on societies throughout history.