525: Some Sort of Metal

Dr. Tom Williams spoke with us about robots, ethics, teaching, and books. Then we talked about mines, umpires, water, and more books.

Tom is the author of Degrees of Freedom: On Robotics and Social Justice (free at MIT Press: Degrees of Freedom: On Robotics and Social Justice!). 

As part of the discussion, we talked about some other books and media:

• Nonfiction:

  • Sex, Race, and Robots: How to Be Human in the Age of AI by Ayanna Howard (Embedded episodes 367: Data of Our Lives and 207: I Love My Robot Monkey Head)

  • Embodied AI Safety: Reimagining safety engineering for artificial intelligence in physical systems by Philip Koopman (related Embedded episode 514: Just Turn Off All the Computers) 

  • Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence by Kate Crawford

  • Waki Kamino's research on robot umpires: Beyond Accuracy: Rethinking the Value of AI in Decision-Making Through Baseball's Automated Ball-Strike (ABS) System (or see the summary in the Cornell Chronicle: AI on deck: assessing impact of MLB's new ball-strike system)

• Fiction:

  • A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chalmers 

  • Platform Decay (The Murderbot Diaries Book 8) by Martha Wells (Embedded episode 432: Robot Bechdel Test) 

  • Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor

  • The Good Place TV show was mentioned a few times as an introduction to ethics for people who prefer their education crammed with amusement.

  • Critical Role web series

There was a discussion about water use in AI. Tom recommends Why is Everyone So Wrong About AI Water Use?? while Elecia unsurprisingly mispronounces synecdoche. 

Tom is a computer science professor at the Colorado School of Mines where he runs the Mines Interactive Robotics Research Lab (MIRROR lab). See also Tom's page on mines.edu.

The final quote is from an essay written by Karel Capek and translated to English in in The Man Who Coined the Word "Robot" Defends Himself - IEEE Spectrum.