Professor Kevin LaGrandeur
Kevin LaGrandeur, Ph.D. is Professor of English at the New York Institute of Technology (NYIT) and Fellow at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technology, an International Think Tank which promotes ideas about how technological progress can increase freedom, happiness, and human flourishing in democratic societies.
At NYIT, Kevin specializes in Technology and Culture, Philosophy of Technology (especially normative ethics and public policy), History of AI, Renaissance Literature, Technology, and Science. He began exploring the intersections between technology and culture in the early 1990s.
Kevin is also a Founding Board Member of the new journal AI and Ethics published by Springer.
Kevin is also a member of The Modern Language Association and the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts of which he served on the executive board. His recent research interest is in researching the philosophical and social dimensions of current efforts to develop an artificial conscience for robots (in connection with a European Union EACEA Grant).
Kevin is a published author and has as well written many articles and conference presentations on digital culture, on Artificial Intelligence and ethics, and on literature and science. His publications have appeared in journals such as Computers & Texts, Computers and the Humanities and Science Fiction Studies. He has also published chapters in books such as Eloquent Images: Word and Image in the Age of New Media and Beyond Artificial Intelligence: The Disappearing Human-Machine Divide and in popular publications such as USA Today and United Press International (UPI).
Read Surviving the invasion of the job-snatchers: Column and Outside View: The Mars Landing and Artificial Intelligence, which discusses future ethical protocols for developing AI.
His first published book is Androids and Intelligent Networks in Early Modern Literature and Culture: Artificial Slaves (2013), which is part of the series Routledge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture and was Awarded a 2014 Science Fiction and Technoculture Studies Prize. This book examines how representations of artificial servants in pre-empirical literature and culture reflect the promises and dangers of technological self-enhancement, as understood at the time, and how those reflections might resonate with today’s developments in intelligent technology.
In 2017, he published Surviving the Machine Age: Intelligent Technology and the Transformation of Human Work, co-edited with James J. Hughes.
This book examines the current state of the technologically-caused unemployed and the experts collected in the book attempt to answer the question of how to proceed into an era beyond technological unemployment and offer suggestions for adapting to a more symbiotic economic relationship with AI.
Previously, he was the Director of Technical Writing Programs at NYIT between 2000 and 2016 and the Director at Hofstra University Writing Center between 1994 and 1998.
On a professional level, Kevin was previously an Associate Professor of English at NYIT in 2003 to 2014, an Assistant Professor at NYIT between 1999 and 2003, and at Hofstra University from 1992 until 1999.
Kevin earned his Ph.D. in English Aesthetic Philosophy in 1992 and his Master’s Degree of Arts in English, both at the University of California in Irvine. He earned his two Bachelor’s Degrees of Arts, one in English and another in Economics, at the University of California in Davis.
Watch Kevin LaGrandeur on Surviving the Machine Age and How to responsibly develop AI tools to fight the Covid virus.
Watch LOGOTEL POSTHUMAN: Milano Design Week 2017 interview with Kevin Lagrandeur and Ancient Definitions of Personhood and Difficult Social Precedents: The Homunculus, the Golem, and Aristotle.
Listen to Academic Minute: AI Taking Jobs and Surviving the Machine Age – Technological Job Loss.
Read Here’s How We Can Make AI for Tracking Covid Safer. Read Kevin’s essay Posthuman and contemporary art.
Read about his talk on Robocalypse Now?: Technology and the Future of Work.
Visit his LinkedIn profile, ResearchGate profile, NYIT profile, Posthumans profile, and Academia profile. Follow him on Facebook, Google Scholar, Amazon, and Twitter.
