Will machines reactivate the war of the sexes or render it obsolete? And will they make the working class disappear or reinforce its presence?

Might we think that robots are going to be friends who will allow us to (finally) get rid of all these (too-) human friends who still encumber us?

Can religions survive robots, or will the latter make them definitively obsolete?

Will robots profoundly transform the parent/child bond and eliminate this form of politico-economico-affective organisation that we call the family?

We are pleased to invite you to the workshop Ecotic, a unique workshop on philosophy and technology where we will discuss about the ecotic challenge of political, religious and ecological stakes of autonomous robotics with panel of experts, and try to answer some thought provoking questions.

Pictures of the event are here!

	Dominique Lestel (ENS, Paris & TUAT, Tokyo) is a French philosopher with in the Department of Philosophy of the Ecole normale supérieure of Paris (ENS) where he teaches contemporary philosophy and works mainly on the philosophy of human/non-human shared life. He has been a research engineer in Bull Artificial Intelligence Lab (1984-1986) and got a Ph.D. of the EHESS in 1986. He introduced cognitive sciences at ENS in 1994, with logician Giuseppe Longo and physicist Jean-Pierre Nadal and he has been a founding member of the Department of Cognitive Sciences of ENS until 2012. He has got research positions at University of California, MIT, Boston University, Université de Montréal, Macquarie University and has been a Visiting Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, at Tokyo University of Foreign Language and at Keio University.  In 2013-2014, he was a visiting scientist at the University of Tokyo, in the Japanese-French Laboratory of Informatics with a grant by the French National Center of Scientific Research (CNRS) to work on the philosophy of existential robotics. He has published many books including “Eat that Book. A Carnivore’s Manifesto”, 2016, Columbia University Press. In 2014, the Oxford journal “Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities” has published a special issue on his work. In 2017 in was awarded long-term JSPS Fellowship.
	Gentiane Venture (TUAT, Tokyo) is a French Roboticist who has been working in academia in Tokyo, Japan for more than 10 years. She is a distinguished professor with the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology. After graduating from Ecole Centrale de Nantes and obtaining a PhD from University of Nantes in 2000 and 2003 respectively, she works at the French Nuclear Agency and at the University of Tokyo. She started in 2009 with Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology where she has established an international research group working on human science and robotics. The researchers of her group try to encompass human motion dynamics and non-verbal communication into complex intelligent robot behavior design to achieve personalized human machine interaction. The work of her group is highly interdisciplinary by collaborating with therapists, sociologists, psychologists, physiologists, philosophers, neuroscientists, ergonomists, biomechanists, and designers.
	Matthew Chrulew (Curtin University, Perth) is a speculative fiction writer and a research fellow in the Centre for Culture and Technology at Curtin University. He is writing a natural and cultural history of the mammoth, and a post-apocalyptic novel of its resurrection and survival.

contact us: ecotic@m2.tuat.ac.jp
a workshop organized with the support of the French Embassy in Tokyo, Curtin University and Global Innovation  Research at Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology