On a rainy January night last week, I went to a talk by Professor Michael Sandel whose class I audited several years ago.  ­(That Harvard course, “Justice,” is free to all on Youtube.)

In his talk, “Ethics and Artificial Intelligence,” Sandel posed issues, asked us for a vote on which side we would take and then called on audience members who took one side or the other to explain why. Following are the issues:

#1 Meeting potential partners:  who would you trust more to choose candidates for you–your mother or a dating app?

#2 Would de-aging Harrison Ford by AI in a film be unethical? One audience member argued to do so was ageism.  Sandel responded, “What about aging a character during a film.  Is that ageism?"

#3 If a loved one, say a grandparent, before passing away, had created an online chatbot version of him/herself, would you use that chatbot?

The real question is “Will technology change what it means to be human?”

What do you think?