Human Relationships in an Artificial World

Thompson Room, Barker Center
12 Quincy St.
Cambridge
Mon., Apr. 27, 2026, 4:30 – 6 p.m.



The intellectual framing of this panel begins from a long-standing insight in philosophical and social thought: that human identity and moral life are formed through encounter and interdependence—through how we live and build relationships with others. As generative AI systems increasingly shape how people learn, work, seek companionship, and experience solitude, we ask: what happens to human relationships when technologies can meet us in the very forms of interaction through which those relationships have traditionally been constituted? How might the availability of fluent, responsive, non-human interlocutors reshape the value we place on the effort, vulnerability, and reciprocity required by relationships with other humans—and, in turn, our understanding of the human condition itself?

Gazette Classification: Ethics, Humanities, Lecture
Organization/Sponsor: Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics
Speaker(s): Jonathan Zittrain, George Bemis Professor of International Law at Harvard Law School, Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, Professor of Computer Science at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Director of the Harvard Law School Library, and Co-Founder of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, Carissa Véliz, Associate Professor at the Faculty of Philosophy and the Institute for Ethics in AI, University of Oxford
Cost: Free
Harvard Key Required: No
More info: www.ethics.harvard.edu…