Augmenting Humanity: CXR and the Case for an Open, Ethical Spatial Computing Future
Date: September 23, 2026, 3:30 – 5:30 pm
Reception: 3:30 – 4:00 pm
Lecture: 4:00 – 5:30 pm
Location: TBD
Speaker: Barry Silverstein
As artificial intelligence grows more capable, a familiar anxiety resurfaces: will humans become unnecessary? This talk argues for a different answer — one in which the goal is not to compete with AI but to build the interfaces through which humans and AI collaborate at their mutual best.
Within the decade, digital overlays driven by contextual AI will begin reshaping how we perceive and navigate the world — enhancing surgical precision, transforming how students learn, and redefining what it means to interact with a computer. The question is not whether this transition will happen, but who will design it and toward what ends.
The University of Rochester’s Center for Extended Reality (CXR) brings together faculty across engineering, medicine, neuroscience, education, and the humanities to pursue that design challenge as a shared mission. This talk presents CXR’s transdisciplinary framework — spanning hardware innovation in optics and display, human-computer interface research, applied clinical development, and ethical governance — and explains why Rochester’s existing strengths make it a natural hub for this work.
The audience will hear how each school and division on campus connects to this agenda, and how CXR aims to advance Rochester’s core missions of education, research, and health through a coherent, collaborative vision of what human-AI interaction can and should become.
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