Tom Williams

@tomwilliams.phd

691 Followers 823 Following

Human-Robot Interaction researcher, Associate Professor of Computer Science at Colorado School of Mines. Author of "Degrees of Freedom: On Robotics and Social Justice" (MIT Press 2025). Personal: tomwilliams.phd Lab: MIRRORLab.mines.edu

Roboticists seeking to adopt an abolitionist robotics would thus not only refuse to collaborate with the police or work to oppose them, but also look beyond policing-oriented solutions to societal problems by working to understand how robots can (1) meet communities’ health and safety needs in new ways that do not involve or require policing (e.g., as part of non- police mobile mental health teams278), especially in domains where policing is currently the required or normalized solution; (2) provide new opportunities for forging solidarities, connections, and social relations between otherwise isolated community members (e.g., through robots that encourage commu- nity members to support the needs of their unhoused neighbors279); (3) be developed and deployed in ways that neither require nor support capitalist modes of production and accumulation; and (4) afford communities new opportunities to create, encode, and make manifest their shared values and their alternative imaginaries for what our future could hold. Finally, roboti- cists seeking to adopt an abolitionist robotics could work not only to pursue these goals in the research laboratory but also to push for the policy and regu- latory changes needed to achieve them280 and to teach new students about the importance of these goals through pedagogical frameworks such as Tiera Tanksley’s abolitionist pedagogy.281
Cultural power in robotics: escaping the white patriarchal robot imaginary