Course structure

The issues surfaced in this class mix together specific technology concepts with ethics and morality arguments in sophisticated ways; therefore this course depends upon deep, intellectually engaging discussions in class.  To make this possible, intensive reading assignments form the brunt of out-of-class work for students.  However, key readings are not enough.  Students need to have read and thought about the readings deeply enough to be able to move from superficial to more meaningful discussions of the issues during class-time.  To prepare them for class in this sense, I pair reading assignments with reading questions that all require essay responses.  Furthermore, because the questions and answers are not addressing fact, but rather dealing with deep analysis, the answers provided by the students are all open-format.  So, a student who is fourth to answer a specific Singularity question has the responsibility of not only reading the article, but also reading the three prior answers, considering those answers, then adding to the discussion with their homework response.  All of these discussions are due before we discuss that topic in-class, and I force this by offering no partial credit for homework completed after its due date, two hours before that day’s class period begins. 

In-class discussions include whole-class, teacher-led analyses and small-group mini-discussions.  The small group format is very effective and pulling all students into active analysis.  I count students off into groups of nominally 3 to 4 students.  Each subgroup takes ten to twenty minutes to consider specific questions and formulate a group answer.  Following this phase, all groups turn toward one-another and each group summarizes their answer for the entire class, where a whole-room discussion then proceeds.  Often, during this whole-room reflection, I play the role of facilitator, ensuring that all small groups are heard, then trying to draw, on the wall, a concept diagram that identifies the answers provided by all sub-groups together with the relationships between their answers.

Two other types of class sessions include project report days and guest lecturer visits.  Project report days provide a forum for groups and individuals to present their findings back to the class as a whole.  To ensure comprehensive capture of course materials, I insist that all the assets used during such presentations (e.g. powerpoints slides, documents, animations) are already uploaded to the course website, and therefore the speakers access the material there during their presentations. 

Guest lecturers come both from within the field of robotics and from areas altogether outside robotics but relevant to the ethical frameworks side of the equation.  For instance a human-robot interaction expert provides context on how the HRI field approaches human trials and the modeling of the human impact of social robots.  A professor from the Design department and another professor from the business school both make remarks on how ethics and morality are evaluated or used in the study and practice of their respective fields.  Because of the national debate whirling around the inclusion or exclusion of ethics coursework from core business master’s degree requirements, a business professor specializing in ethics can also talk about the politics of introducing ethical analyses to curricular subjects that have traditionally shied away from such provocative material.

Just as guest lecturers should come from both within robotics’ sub-disciplines and outside field, so the required reading list combines in-field and out-of-field readings.  It would be tempting to consider doing this in a serial manner, providing a grounding in ethical frameworks such as Consequentialist Ethics, then after providing framework tools, then applying these tools to specific sub-fields of robotics present, and perhaps ending with more notional thoughts about robotics’ future.  But this will turn off the engineers, who will find ethical frameworks without working applications a bore; and will also turn off futurists who are signing up for ethics and robotics because they care mostly about where society is headed.  Therefore you will see that the semester-long syllabus I have used mixes futurism, formal ethical frameworks and current events together in an interleaved manner throughout the course.  This enables students to begin to sense that they have a need for grounded frameworks by surfacing to them complex, very real questions about concrete robotics; then after they have a sense of need providing them with multiple frameworks for evaluating technology and society from an ethical perspective.  Futurism- particularly the Singularity- offers a fertile area for reading and debate, because of the stature of authors who have written on this topic and because it exposes issues relating to serious technical details, massive ethical questions.  It also takes us to the heart of rhetorical analysis because of the way in which the press and researchers use uninformative arguments to make unbalanced Singularity cases.  Temporally mixing futurism, ethical frameworks and technology detail provides hooks for several types of students and makes the course provocative enough to witness the sort of spirited debates early in the semester that lead to an animated and awake student group all term long.