Topics
I organize course topics into three categories for this list: Background; Robotics Now; and Futurism. Background captures topics that are not specific to robotics, including source material on ethics and analyses dedicated to other fields that can serve as examples to consider for robotics. Robotics Now includes topics representing specific classes of ongoing robotics research and also analyses of current events and news coverage of robotics. Futurism topics examine both research and rhetoric relating to the near and far future of robotics, focusing on how ethical considerations could impact the agenda we set for technological roadmaps. Note again that the topics are not in the order I recommend for course inclusion. See syllabus as a demonstration of how background, current events and futuristic examples can be interleaved to create a more dynamic classroom experience.
1 Background
1.1 Culture & Sociology of Science; 2-3 classes
Sociology of science and culture of science specialists study the way in which meaning-making happens in science: how do scientists communicate to one-another and to the public about their scientific work, and how in turn does the public make sense of science? By turning to two of the most famous authors in the domain of sociology of science, we expose students to a new way to think about science, not in terms of revealing truth, but in terms of how truth may itself be shaped by social interaction. Excerpts from Thomas Gieryn’s Cultural Boundaries of Science (Gieryn1) provide semantics for how to talk about the impact of scientists socially, and a very important definition of science as boundary work, constantly redefining the relationship between knowledge, semantics and people. Excerpts from Bruno Latour’s Science in Action (Latour1) study the community of scientists and how group-think, peer-pressure and community behavior can crowd out consideration of ethics and morality at times. This topic provides such important concepts and semantics for talking about the qualities and roles of innovators and entire communities that I present the topic first in the semester-long course.
1.2 Case Study: Cold Fusion, 1 class
In Gieryn’s Cultural Boundaries of Science (Gieryn2) a long narrative provides a cultural study of how the Cold Fusion events capture an example of science gone awry. This narrative describes the way a university chose to control the communication of innovation, the hiding of intellectual property at the cost of peer review, the impact of these strategies on the public and on federal funding decisions, and how the American Physical Society was able to finally resolve the chaos of the Cold Fusion debate with rational community-based cooperation. This case study is an excellent cautionary tale of how, if handled incorrectly, future announcements of robotics innovation can trigger socially unhealthy fallout- and how to avoid such missteps. Because students in today’s classroom are too young to remember Pons and Fleischmann, this is an especially educational and interesting tale for analysis and reflection.
1.3 Introduction to Ethics; 2-3 classes
This topic undertakes to provide sufficient exposure for the students to ethical analytical frameworks for them to be able to study real robot-ethical considerations from the point of view of multiple ethical frameworks. This is important both so that students have the tools to conduct an ethical analysis formally, and so that they realize there is no single, correct ethical analysis, but rather a number of alternative approaches that can be valid. To didactically provide background, I feel the most important frameworks to cover are those of Consequentialist Ethics and Aristotelian Ethics, or the Ethics of Character and Virtue. These are sufficiently different ethical frameworks that the students can begin to appreciate the diversity of possibilities from such a broad spanning set. In this course I have chosen to use draft chapters provides by Professor Lawrence Hinman, co-Director at the Center for Ethics in Science & Technology at the University of San Diego (Hinman1; Hinman2). His chapters are very clearly written and appropriate for the novice student, as will be the case with nearly every engineer in the room. He carefully demonstrates that any ethical framework, taken to the limit, becomes absurd in its ability to make black-and-white estimations of ethicality that begin to seem absurd. I avoid covering this introductory topic initially in the class, so as to whet the appetite of the students with serious ethical dilemmas from within robotics first. That way, as they begin to read Hinman, they already begin to apply the logic of the utilitarian framework, for instance, to very real problems posed in robotics research. A very good chance to apply the above ethical frameworks exists in the reading and analysis of Petersen's The Ethics of Robot Servitude. Using classical ethical analyses, Peterson makes a case for why it is appropriate for robots to serve, when they are designed to want to be servants. The arguments have enough ethical depth to be critiqued meaningfully by the student who has read the above Hinman chapters.
1.4 Rhetoric and Communication, 2-3 classes
This topic looks toward the use of rhetoric in communicating science. The choice of language can be a powerful deciding force in how the press, the public and funders visualize the future of a technology innovation. A brief excerpt from Bruno Latour’s Science in Action (Latour2) suggests how technical and non-technical language can handicap the public’s understanding of scientific controversy. In the classic paper, Artificial Intelligence meets Natural Stupidity, Drew McDermott (McDermott) describes the inflationary semantic spiral of Artificial Intelligence, where even the words of variables in computer programs were so anthropocentric as to misinform the scientists themselves about the power of their creations. In The Rhetoric of Robotics, an unpublished manuscript written by Illah Nourbakhsh, I draw on examples from within robotics to show how communication techniques have mislabeled robotic innovations in ways that confuse the public and policymakers alike regarding the future impact that robot innovations shall have on society.
2 Robotics Now
2.1 Robotics News- Student Analysis – 1-2 classes
While historical and contemporary news stories are assigned as some of the readings in other subsections of Robotics Now and Futurism, this specific topic relies on the students to themselves identify unique robotics news stories in the popular press within the past five years. See Student Project Details for a project homework description of this assignment. Following students’ preliminary work in selecting and reading one news story, each student prepares then delivers an in-class presentation that evaluates the news story from technical, rhetorical and societal perspectives. This topic will take 1 – 2 days depending on the number of students in the course, since at minimum 10 – 15 minutes is required for each individual student report and classroom subject discussion.
2.2 Social and Caregiving Robotics; 2-3 classes
Two trends that are pushing society towards a more intimate and widespread level of interaction between people and robotics in the home environment are the demographic trends of life expectancy, and the technical advances in robotics that are making the dream of robotics caring for people edge ever closer to reality. In this section we read a well-known foundation article by Sherry Turkle, Authenticity in the Age of Digital Companions, which discusses how and what sort of relationships can be forged between robots and people, even in the case of humans serving as nurturers of robots, such as might be postulated regarding Cynthia Breazeals’ early work and relationship with Kismet. Two specific, more application-specific readings follow on the topic of robots serving as caregivers for humans. In a fascinating article by Michael Decker, Caregiving robots and ethical reflection, he asks and answers what fundamental ethical concepts must govern the relationship between caregiving robots and cared-for humans. He specifically introduces application of Kant’s formula of human, which centers on the concept of personal autonomy, to demonstrate how robots must be designed so as not to reduce the autonomy of humans, even under their care. In Robot caregivers: harbingers of expanded freedom for all? the authors Jason Borenstein and Yvette Pearson provide a useful survey resource regarding the existing body of work on robots for caregiving, and then apply a capabilities-based argument that derives from some of the same philosophical stance as Kant to explicate key advances and qualities required for caregiving robots to succeed both technically and ethically.
2.3 Artificial Morality; 2-3 classes
Artificial Morality is a field extending both computational ethics and artificial intelligence in the hopes of creating computational cognitive processes that have the ability to reason about morality and, therefore, achieve the goal of being moral agents. This is a hot topic of research within AI and has direct relevance to the future of robotics and to the question of ethics as applied to robotics- and even robots. We begin with two articles by Wendell Wallach- he is an outstanding communicator in this area of inquiry. Artificial Morality sets the stage for further reading by defining the field, the challenges and the hopes of the research movement underway. In Implementing Moral Decision making Faculties in Computers and Robots, Wallach proposes a pathway for creating moral decision-makers in a bottom-up fashion, with learning embedded in the representation and computational processes of the agent. This text provides the technical bite that enables course students to begin considering technical approaches within robots and AI specific to ethics- in sharp detail. When is a Robot a Moral Agent? by John Sullins and Robot Ethics by Robert Sawyer are two opinion pieces on the role of morality in robotics, and these are effective articles for catalyzing lively in-class discussion on both ethical and technical questions of feasibility and morality relating to autonomous moral agent design.
2.4 Military Robotics; 2-3 days
Artificial Morality is a technical field that encompasses both caregiving robots and military robots as applications where ethical reasoning on the part of autonomous agents is both studied and required. But military robotics is such an emotionally and technically charged topic area of study that I have chosen to dedicate a course topic entirely to this area. We start with selections from PW Singer’s book, Wired for War (Singer2). These selections are ethnographic in nature, painting a rich picture of the key actors in the military robotics debate, and also a good primer on existing technology and near-future technology that will be operational in the military. Selections from Ron Arkin’s book, Governing Lethal Behavior in Autonomous Robots (Arkin), describes how Arkin proposes to technically architect an ethical adapter that, he proposes, would enable military robotics to act more ethically than soldiers historically have. This piece is an excellent launching point for discussion because of its mixture of ethical stance in comparing human and robot ethical performance and because it has sufficient technical detail to enable students to debate the limitations of the actual technology as proposed.
Lichocki, Kahn and Billard's survey paper (Lichocki) presents a broad overview of research in all three of the above sub-fields, discussing the potential ethical pitfalls of service robots, lethal robots and the artificial morality research space. This survey piece strikes an objective tone, presenting summaries of dozens of research studies without taking a strong ethical stance. It would be particularly useful in conjunction with Calo's chapter on Robotics and Privacy in a short-term overview session on ethics and robotics that does not present sufficient time for deep source reading. A short essay by Robert Sparrow espouses the limitation of total destructive power by autonomous military machines in Predators or Plowshares.
3 Futurism
3.1 Singularity
The Singularity is a perfect topic for Ethics and Robotics because it is both sweeping and tremendously questionable from both technical and ethical points of view. It is also a topic rife with articles in both the popular press and in the more technical literature. We begin with excerpts from PW Singer’s Wired for War (Singer1) that are ethnographic in nature. Singer paints a comprehensive portrait of most of the major proponents of Singularity theory, and this is especially apt as the students prepare to read articles by two such authors, Moravec and Kurzweil. Moravec’s Rise of the Robots represents his existing writings and opinion pieces well, describing his vision for a future in which robots surpass humans cognitively. Kurzweil’s The Coming Merging of Mind and Machine describes a new species born soon out of the combination of human and computer elements following the singularity. These pieces, while tremendously interesting for analysis and reflection, are doubly so when they follow Singer’s introductions to the people and politics behind the Singularity visions. Rich classroom discussions follow these readings, both attending to what is feasible and inbelievable in the works technically, but also commenting on and evaluating the ethical repercussions of this direction of visioning. A new addition to this set is Pearce's The Biointelligence Explosion. This piece is a study in rhetoric, offering a glimpse of how writers pique readers concerning future technology with language that is formulated to trigger complex emotions rather than clear thinking.
3.2 Gray Goo; 1 class
The topic title, “Gray Goo,” is borrowed from the moniker, invented by Bill Joy in his article Why the Future doesn’t Need Us to describe how self-replication run amok may infest our analog world with masses of nano-creatures. The work of Bill Joy is frequently avoided in computer science departments, and this is a shame. The reasoning used by Bill Joy, and particularly the response to this article by computer science advocates of robotics and nanotechnology, provide clear lessons on rhetoric, press relations and public relations that are core to the study of ethics and robotics. In this section I pair the original Bill Joy article with a well-known rebuttal by Selmer Bringsjord, Ethical robotics: the future can heed us. This point-by-point response is fascinating both in its own sense of grandness and in the specific arguments it looses in response to Joy’s points.
3.3 Self-replication; 1-2 classes
Self-replication research forms an important topic in this class because it combines a rich history of news-story exaggeration with important technical work and, finally, valid downstream ethical concerns. Adrian Cho is a news reporter, and his article Making Machines that Make Others of their Kind is a brief public-facing survey that will help students realize both how diverse robotics research in this field is, and how imprecise the concept of self-replication remains. Moshe Sipper and James Reggia have an eight-page article within a Scientific American special issue on Robots, called Go forth and replicate. In this article, researchers Sipper and Reggia do an excellent job of describing self-replication challenges technically, and in particular addressing simulation of replication using advanced computational techniques. Finally, Kenneth Chang’s famous newspaper piece from 2000, Scientists report they have made robot that makes its own robots is the perfect analytical piece for students to apply their skills at rhetorical analysis to a real article that carries historical import and can easily be dissected. This article, which famously describes earlier research of Pollack and Lipson, serves as an excellent resource for critical analysis by students.