Degrees of Freedom Update 10: Giants

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

Today, I thought I’d mark our one-week-to-launch milestone by recognizing the authors on whose work I most heavily build, as measured by number of citations. I think this is quite revealing as to the interdisciplinarity of Degrees of Freedom, and will surprise some readers! I’ll exclude my own work and the work of my students (although the work of several of my students, especially that of Blake Jackson and Rena Zhu, makes a significant appearance!).

Here are the fifteen other authors whose work is most heavily cited.

1. Salem Elzway

   Salem is a Historian at Vanderbilt whose work analyzes the history of robotics and automation from a labor perspective. I strongly recommend his book chapter “Technoliberal Machines” and his dissertation, “Arms of the State”.

2. Patricia Hill Collins

   Patricia Hill Collins is a Sociologist from the University of Maryland, and is the G.O.A.T. She’s the author of “Black Feminist Thought”, whose Matrix of Domination serves as the guiding framework used in Degrees of Freedom.

3. Katie Winkle
   Katie is a Social Roboticist from Uppsala University who is probably our lab’s favorite researcher, and is a close collaborator. Her landmark paper “Feminist Human-Robot Interaction” is required reading.

4. Isaac Asimov
   I’m afraid Degrees of Freedom does not cast Asimov in a terribly flattering light. But as the man who coined the term “robotics” and served as the bridge between Rossum’s Universal Robots and modern science fiction, he plays a key role in the book.

5. Jennifer Rhee
   Jennifer Rhee is a Literary Scholar from Virginia Commonwealth University whose book "The Robot Imaginary” is a foundational text for understanding the interplay between science fiction and engineering.

6. Andrea Ritchie
   Andrea Ritchie is a writer and lawyer who has written a range of truly inspiring works on police abolition. The penultimate chapter of my book deals with issues of robots and policing. Andrea Ritchie’s “Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color” provided a number of statistics quantifying the harms of policing in modern American society.

7. Sarah Brayne
   Sarah Brayne is a Sociologist at Stanford University. Her book “Predict and Surveil” thoughtfully analyzes the “Big Data Dragnet” of modern policing.

8. Ben Jones and Eduardo Mendieta
   Ben Jones and Eduardo Mendieta are ethicists from the Rock Ethics Institute at Penn State University (which is where Alan Wagner, one of my early draft readers is also based!) Technically the work of these authors is not heavily cited. However, I cite a wide range of chapters from their excellent edited volume “The Ethics of Policing”, and they thus deserve a nod in this list!

9. Louis Chude-Sokei
   Louis Chude-Sokei is a Literary Scholar at Boston University who has written on a wide range of topics in Black culture, from music to robotics. I cite a variety of his works, but especially “Race and Robotics”.

10. Jason Resnikoff
    Jason Resnikoff is a Historian of labor and automation at the University of Groningen, and a close collaborator of Salem Elzway (see above). His book “Labor’s End” is phenomenal, as is his paper with Elzway entitled “Whence Automation”.

11. Morgan Klauss Scheuerman
    Morgan is a Research Scientist on Sony AI's AI Ethics team, and recently completed their PhD from CU Boulder. I cite a wide range of their papers, which I also talk about heavily in my robot ethics class. There are many great papers to choose from, but I most highly recommend “How We’ve Taught Algorithms to See Identity”.

12. Rob Sparrow
    Rob Sparrow is a philosopher from Monash University who has written some of the foundational texts on robotics and race. We also cover several of his papers in my robot ethics class. The key paper of his that I would recommend is “Robotics has a Race Problem”.

13. Vilna Bashi Treitler
    Vilna Bashi Treitler is a Sociologist from Northwestern University, whose work I was introduced to through Duke’s 3C program. Her book “The Ethnic Project” completely shifted how I thought about Race and Ethnicity.

14. Taylor Evans
    Taylor Evans was a literary scholar at UC Riverside, whose dissertation “The Race of Machines” should be a foundational text for anyone interested in the history of robotics in science fiction and its connections with race.

15. Michelle Alexander
    Michelle Alexander is an attorney and civil rights activist. Her book “The New Jim Crow” was another foundational text in my personal journey towards abolitionism.

I hope you’ll give these authors a read! And of course, I hope you’ll give Degrees of Freedom a read in one week’s time!

Remind me, where can I get Degrees of Freedom?

Thanks for reading,

Tom

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