Philosophy of Robotics Reading Group

Next discussion: TBA

Topic Suggestions

Below is a list of some suggestions for future discussions.  Feel free to discuss any other papers relevant to both philosophy and robotics. 

Please e-mail the group moderator Geoff Hollinger (gholling@andrew.cmu.edu) with comments or questions.

 

1. Look at the philosophical backings of social robotics. How can we use philosophy of the mind to improve robots that interact with humans?

2. Examine the pluses and minuses of the reactive architecture. I’m a big fan of the paper “Achieving Artificial Intelligence through Building Robots” by Rod Brooks.

3. Look at the relationship between Bayesian statistics and human decision making. “Why I am not a Bayesian” by Clark Glymour would be the place to start.

4. Anything related to cognitive robotics would be great.

5. Traditional AI and the Turing test.  Lots of good stuff here under background reading.

6. Anything by Daniel Dennett.  His publications are here.

7. Stuff by Marvin Minsky.  His homepage is here.

8. Discuss anything related to ethics of technology. Specifically, I think the final story in Isaac Asimov’s I-Robot brings up a lot of interesting issues relating to Utilitarianism. I can’t find it on the internet though.

9. Look at Deleuze’s conception of destructive lines of flight and relate them to a postmodern deconstruction of mathematical techniques, thus showing that mathematical analysis is inherently flawed and socially constructed.  Just kidding...