Degrees of Freedom Update 9: Launch Sale Preview — and DoF Recipes

What’s Covered in Degrees of Freedom

First, let’s consider what’s covered in each chapter.

1. Chapter one (~25 pages) introduces the overarching concepts of the book, the central theory used to structure the book (Patricia Hill Collins’ Matrix of Domination), and the ways this contrasts with the focus on interpersonal power that is currently dominant in social robotics.

2. Chapter two (~45 pages) can be used to introduce students to the history of robotics, to show the ways that issues of race and gender have been baked into the design of robots from their inception, and to explain the evolution of the White Patriarchal Robot Imaginary.

3. Chapter three (~45 pages) can be used to introduce students to the idea of Social Identity Design Cues, and the ways robots might be designed to subvert rather than reinforce White and Patriarchal power in the cultural domain.

4. Chapter four (~25 pages) can be used to introduce students interested in traditional AI techniques to the concept of the New Jim Cobot, and the ways that robots’ moral reasoning systems can be designed to subvert rather than reinforce White and Patriarchal power in the disciplinary domain.

5. Chapter five (~30 pages) can be used to introduce students interested in machine learning techniques to similar concepts, and the ways that robots’ perceptual (speech recognition and computer vision) systems can similarly be designed to subvert rather than reinforce White and Patriarchal power in the disciplinary domain.

6. Chapter six (~45 pages) dives into a case study application domain (robots in policing) and can thus be used to demonstrate to students the ways that robots are actively being used for harm in the present moment, to introduce students to the concept of Abolitionist Robotics, and to explain to students the ways that engineers might approach the robotics industry in ways that subvert rather than reinforce White and Patriarchal power in the structural domain.

7. Chapter seven (~10 pages) wraps up the book, and summarizes its arguments and contributions.

Notably, chapters two through six are each broken into three sections: typically one that covers the background and history that the reader needs to know, one that covers how, due to that history, robots tend to reinforce White and Patriarchal power in the domain of power explored in that chapter, and one that covers the ways that roboticists might work to subvert rather than reinforce White and Patriarchal power in that domain.

Because of this, there are six main ways that Degrees of Freedom could be used in a class: instructors could choose to cover a single chapter — or the whole book; and instructors could choose to cover each chapter during a class, a week, or over multiple weeks.

The following table shows how many one-hour class sessions would be needed under each of these approaches.

In the rest of this post I’ll lay out syllabi for the different approaches to covering the book as a whole, from which chapter-level approaches can easily be extracted.

Covering One Chapter Per Class

Covering One Chapter Per Week

Covering One Section Per Week

Note: in this approach, students should be assigned readings beyond the book, e.g., key sources discussed in the book, and/or sources from my Robot Ethics Reading List.

If you are instructor and use Degrees of Freedom according to any of these formats (or another!) please email me to let me know!

Remind me, where can I get Degrees of Freedom?

Thanks for reading,

Tom

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