16-735 Ethics and Robotics

Carnegie Mellon University
Spring 2021, TR 12:20-1:40pm

Syllabus	SIGCSE paper	Ethics modules	Use our materials

This course contextualizes robotics, AI, and machine learning within cultural conversation, ethics, and power relationships in society. It will draw upon "AI and Humanity" as well as numerous other texts, including Mindless by Simon Head, Drone Theory by Grégoire Chamayou, and news articles. The course will culminate in an ethics module design project in collaboration with an instructor of another robotics course. Our target audience is undergraduate and graduate students who will participate in computer science and robotics research and can use this course to inform future research and career decisions.

Selected Topics

• Surveillance, Information, Humanity
• Economy and Labor
• Fairness and Bias in Machine Learning
• Safety and Trust
• Regulation
• Ethics Pedagogy
• Military Robotics
• Robotics, AI, and Law

Learning Objectives

• Critically evaluate the ethics of technology and its societal ramifications.
• Articulate future implications of a new technology through writing and creative storytelling.
• Create an ethics reflection module for curricular deployment in a technical course.
• Identify real-world examples of ethical implications of robotics research and evaluate the impact of related decisions.

Final Project

Your final project will be working with an instructor for another RI course and designing an ethics module to fit into their curriculum, with the goal of this ethics module being used the following year.

Instructors

Illah Nourbakhsh illah@cs.cmu.edu

Victoria Dean vdean@cs.cmu.edu