Abstract

Our thinking about existence in the space between man and machine has basically only just begun. But what was science fiction just a few years ago has long since entered our everyday lives: Care robots, war robots, sex robots, and similar entities. Will machines develop into ethical actors with consciousness in the future? Will they be able to morally guide their own behavior? This also touches on broader questions of responsibility: Who will make decisions in the future? There have long been dystopian visions of a threat to the world from vastly superior artificial intelligences as well as utopian hopes for a new digital world in which the human spirit makes itself immortal. In this volume, ethicists, literary scholars, sociologists, and futurists set out in search of relevant questions and conceivable answers. It is about the human-machine relationship, possibilities of acting wisely in the machine age, autonomous and connected driving and its dilemmas, and work and working in the future. At the end, there is a plea for a new way of thinking about education in the digital age.