The Department of Philosophy was pleased to welcome another Veroni speaker in Fall 2026: Dr. Murilo Karasinski who is a Professor and Researcher in Bioethics at the Pontifical Catholic University of Paran谩 (PUCPR), Brazil. PUCPR is a sister school to KSU, and KSU faculty regularly offer courses at the Brazilian university. Further, Brazilian students are eligible to transfer their degree program and finish their degree at KSU in Ohio. Dr. Karasinski has been collaborating with two KSU professors, Dr. Deborah Barndbaum and Dr. Kimberly Garchar, for one year, so his visit was fortuitous for many reasons. It strengthened already existing collaborative work, built upon KSU鈥檚 strengths in Bioethics, and illustrated a specific bioethical challenge to students and faculty (both from within the department and in other departments).
Dr. Karasinski鈥檚 lecture was titled 鈥淭he Future Is Not What It Used to Be: Bioethics for a Humanity on Lease.鈥 Dr Karasinski writes:
Artificial intelligence is changing the ways in which we learn, remember, judge, care, and create. Many of these capacities depend on platforms whose rules, prices, updates, and forms of access are set by institutions beyond the reach of most users. This lecture names that emerging condition 鈥渉umanity on lease.鈥
Drawing on cases from medicine, education, and everyday life in the United States, Brazil, and Latin America, the lecture examines how AI reshapes autonomy, moral responsibility, and our relationship with the future. What happens when people rely on systems they cannot govern for capacities through which they understand the world and decide who they wish to become? The lecture invites the audience to reconsider technological progress through responsibility, shared agency, and the human capacities we wish to protect.
In his lecture, Dr. Karasinski highlighted the case of Patient R, who suffered from severe epilepsy. She would sometimes experience seizures as often as every five minutes, which substantially debilitated her and negatively impacted her life. R was recruited into a clinical trial testing an electrical device implanted in her skull. The implant was wildly successful and allowed R to reclaim large swaths of her life. In time, however, the company manufacturing the device, and funding the research, declared bankruptcy. The device was functioning well at the time of their bankruptcy, but the financial decision forced them to discontinue technical support for the device. R eventually felt forced to choose to have the device removed and accept the drastically lower quality of life.
The situation encountered by R illustrated a primary ethical problem in researching medical devices: the amount of obligation incurred by medical device manufacturers to patients. Dr. Karasinski, however, focused on the fact that humans now regularly rely on companies and platforms that they cannot control. He argues that when companies operate these platform and corporations, they incur a responsibility to the human beings dependent upon them. Specifically, humans may be unable to give full informed consent when AI systems are involved.
