Degrees of Freedom Update 3: Why I Wrote this Book!

Hi friend, 

Tomorrow I'll be giving the first post-presale-launch Book Preview Talk on Degrees of Freedom, as part of the Ethics Forum I'm organizing with Ayanna Howard at the 2025 International Conference on Robotics and Automation. 

If you're a roboticist who'll be at ICRA, please come by the Ethics Forum! We’ve got a great lineup of speakers, many of whose work is cited and discussed in Degrees of Freedom: Bill Smart, Wendy Ju, Hee Rin Lee, Salem Elzway, and Jules Roscoe.

If you aren't a roboticist or aren't attending ICRA, don't worry! There'll be plenty of ways to preview the book before it launches!

In the meantime, I'll use this post to share why I wrote Degrees of Freedom.

Why I wrote Degrees of Freedom

To put it simply, we're at a moment in time where we're uniquely poised to tackle the key ethical issues I discuss in Degrees of Freedom, but roboticists are woefully unprepared to do so, both because most aren't aware of the ethical concerns I discuss in the book, and because most aren’t aware of the historical context necessary to genuinely grapple with those concerns.

First, we're at a moment in history where the first interactive robots are being deployed into people's homes. But most roboticists are completely oblivious to the ways their design choices (in terms of what a robot looks like, how it speaks, and so forth) replicate and reinforce racial and gendered stereotypes. Moreover, most robotics really have no idea about the history of robot design and the way it has always been infused with the visual politics of race and gender (let alone the history of race itself). This motivated me to write chapters 2 and 3 of Degrees of Freedom, which provide this historical context, describe these ethical concerns (which relate to issues of power in the cultural domain), and discuss different alternatives we might use to tackle those ethical concerns.

Second, we're at a moment in time where we're debating as a society whether we should leverage technologies like face recognition and large language models, and (if so) how those technologies can be used in a “safe” manner. Yet, while many people are now aware of some of the more overt harms these technologies can cause, most people are unaware of the ways these technologies can more subtly influence society, including the ways that these technologies can reinforce specific logics of race and gender, and the ways that algorithms for keeping robots in line end up being used to control human behavior — in ways that are often used to reinforce White and male standards of behavior. Moreover, most roboticists do not know the history that explains why these technologies tend to have these effects, or the ways that issues of race and gender have always been entangled with the moral philosophies roboticist rely on. This motivated me to write chapters 4 and 5 of Degrees of Freedom, which provide this historical context, describe these ethical concerns (which relate to issues of power in the disciplinary domain), and, again, discuss different alternatives we might use to tackle those ethical concerns.

Finally, we're at a moment in time where police are beginning to work with roboticists directly to help augment their regimes of racialized surveillance and violence… and also at a moment in time where police abolition is being given serious consideration in major American cities. Yet roboticists tend to be largely unaware of what police actually do with their robots, let alone the history of policing that explains why police robots inevitably reinforce racialized surveillance and violence. This motivated me to write chapter 6 of Degrees of Freedom, which provide this historical context, describe these ethical concerns (which relate to issues of power in the structural domain), and makes a call for an abolitionist robotics.

In short, I wrote Degrees of Freedom to help those working in, studying, or academically interested in robotics and AI to better understand these ethical concerns and the historical context behind them — and to better understand the space of solutions available to technologists and designers interested in working toward a more just and ethical robotic future.

Remind me, where can I pre-order Degrees of Freedom?

While the special pre-order sale is now over, Degrees of Freedom is still available for pre-order on websites like Bookshop.org, The MIT Press Bookstore ($75), Amazon, and Barnes & Noble. As a reminder, while I’d love for you to pre-order a physical copy of the book, once the book is published the PDF version will be available FOR FREE on the MIT Press website. Once the link to the Open Access version is up online, I'll share it in this newsletter.

PREORDER FROM BOOKSHOP.ORG →

Thanks for reading,

Tom

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For more information on Tom Williams, visit his personal website at tomwilliams.phd

For more information on Tom’s lab, visit MIRRORLab.mines.edu