Syllabus

In this section I provide several example calendars to demonstrate how topics can be used in a full-term course Ethics and Robotics course, half-term course or just as a week or single-day discussion in a related class such as Introduction to Robotics. 

1 Ethics and Robotics: full-semester (15 week), dedicated course

Note how the syllabus below interleaves technical content, current events research and formal frameworks for ethical analysis.  This interleaving has worked well in sparking motivational interest in a diversity of students within a single course, including philosophy majors, computer scientists and engineers.  In this full-semester course, at least two major student projects are feasible within the 15 week time frame as shown.

2 Ethics and Robotics: half-semester (7 week) mini-course

In a half-term minicourse version of Ethics and Robotics, I would suggest providing enough motivational material to engage the students, and following with enough framework content for them to begin to use ethical analytical processes to deliberately consider robotics activities more formally.  The following calendar proposes this approach by removing case studies and student projects to concentrate on the above activities:

3 Ethics and Robotics: single-day options

A single-day or two-day topic on ethics and robotics cannot hope to teach formal frameworks.  Instead, the goal is likely to surface to students that there are issues worth exploring under the surface of conventional robotics research.  Two specific research topics are excellent examples for such exploration: military robotics and social-caregiving robotics.  Below I describe reading assignments that may be appropriate for a one- or two-day exploration of each subject, particularly when combined with the reading questions archived on this site together with in-classroom discussion.

Option 1: Military robotics and ethics

The assigned reading of Singer2, Arkin and Sparrow and then either Sullins or Sawyer provides enough background on both state-of-art research and character portraits of key researchers to lead to lively classroom discussion.  This is especially effective as a two-day class, with specific small-group action on day two, where groups are challenged with the question of designing acceptance tests for when moral robots are ready for actual military use, and questions of accountability: what strictures should be in place to make the deployment of military robots as ethical as possible from the points of view of accountability and knowledge gap?

Option 2: Robotic caregivers and ethics

Readings by Lichocki, Turkle, Decker and Borenstein prepare the way for a straightforward one-day in-class discussion regarding personal autonomy and caregiving robots.  How and when should robots be allowed to limit the freedom of a person- and what mechanisms ought to be in place for the robot-person relationship to be monitored and reviewed responsibly?  The same question applies to the design and testing of such systems—if you were a member of the licensing board at the governmental level, what controls would be important to institute for the deployment of such systems commercially?