Join 'A Conversation About Robot Futures'
13 OCTOBER
09:00 – 09:15 Welcome by Cristina Zaga
09:15 – 10:15 KEYNOTE: Tom Williams:
End Effector: Roboticists’ Structural Power and the Need for an Abolitionist Robotics
ABSTRACT: Robots are often argued to occupy a unique ontological category in the human mind, somewhere between artifact and person, somewhere between engineering and science fiction. Yet few roboticists acknowledge the way that robots grew to occupy this niche. In this talk, I will begin by describing robots' cultural origination in the White Supremacist ambitions in the 19th-century United States. After laying this groundwork, I will then describe several ways that the design and deployment of modern robots continue to reinforce White Supremacy across multiple domains of power, and the need for roboticists to adopt new tools of responsible design in order to better understand the implications of their design processes -- and ensure that the robots of the future are instead wielded as a force for good. In particular, in this talk I will largely focus on how and why US police are beginning to use robots, the power that roboticists wield in the structural domain when they choose whether or not to collaborate with policing, and the need for an abolitionist robotics.
BIO: Tom Williams is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the Colorado School of Mines, where he directs the Mines Interactive Robotics Research Lab. Prior to joining Mines, Tom earned a joint PhD in Computer Science and Cognitive Science from Tufts University in 2017. Tom’s research focuses on enabling and understanding natural language based human-robot interaction that is sensitive to environmental, cognitive, social, and moral context. His work is funded by grants from NSF, ONR, and ARL, as well as by Early Career awards from NSF, NASA, and AFOSR. He is currently on sabbatical in Bristol, where he is writing a book for MIT press whose central themes will be summarized in this talk.
10:15 – 10:30 Q&A
10:30 – 11:00 Coffee break
11:00 -12:00 Panel Robot Futures: Tech, Justice and Communities
12:00 – 13:00 Wrap-up
12:30 – 13:30 Lunch
It is possible to join online
