In the context of soccer-playing robots, technological advances in robotics and artificial intelligence are mostly perceived as exciting and fun. Whenever I tell people about my research project, they tend to be very curious to learn more about the state of the technology. How well can the robots play soccer? Do they use artificial intelligence? How do they make decisions? And are they going to win the match against humans in 2050?
When it comes to robot soccer, many people perceive the use of the latest technology to allow robots to score more goals - or get fewer time penalties - as desirable. However, similar technological approaches in fields such as object detection or data- and calculation-based decision-making are also used in highly destructive ways.
I am currently attending the conference “Imaginations of Autonomy: On Humans, AI-based Weapon Systems and Responsibility at Machine Speed” at Paderborn University, organized in the context of the competence network “Meaningful Human Control”.
On the first day of the event, during the pre-conference workshop, I learned a lot about the global use of autonomous weapon systems, their geopolitical relevance, and the power structures they reproduce. In this blog post, I want to discuss one aspect in greater detail and relate it to my research, namely that concepts materialize in technologies.
One of the concepts discussed most extensively in the pre-conference workshop was “autonomy.” Similarly to other concepts often drawn upon in technology development – intelligence, curiosity, companionship, etc. – “autonomy” can be conceptualized in different ways. Different conceptualizations can, in turn, lead to various implementations.
In my research, for example, the ambivalence of this concept came up in a discussion about how strongly individual soccer robots should rely on communication with other robots to make their decisions. Should the software aim at gaining a sufficient understanding of the surroundings in each individual robot, or should it aim at using the information gathered by the sensors of all of the team’s robots? It is also worth discussing how the role of humans is conceptualized in robot autonomy. While during a robot soccer game, the rules of the game (which were set by humans) only allow for limited human intervention, the robots could never play soccer without quite a lot of preparatory work by humans.
The influence of concepts should thus not be overlooked in the ethical design of technologies. Discussing and critically scrutinizing the concepts used as guiding principles in technology development, particularly the ones whose meaning is often taken for granted, can help us better understand the technologies that have already started to shape our lives in numerous ways.
I relaunched my website! Here are some of the changes I am particularly excited about.
I now use Jekyll to compile my website locally. It was a bit of a hustle to get it all set up on Windows, which I am (still) using as my main operating system, but it works now! It updates automatically as I make changes, which is excellent for seeing issues in formatting, as well as typos, which I easily overlook in Visual Studio Code. This makes editing the website a lot more convenient and will hopefully lead to fewer commit messages in the style of “typo,” “another typo,” “formatting,” “more formatting,” and “small change” in the new repository. No promises, though!
I also changed a few things about the website’s design that were bugging me. The website now looks better on mobile devices, headings with hyperlinks are now recognizable as such, and the hover effect when hovering over links makes the text darker and not bold. All text is justified except the short info below my picture.
And my favorite: Each blog post now has its own link, and I can add individual open-graph images to each. In this way, in case I have an image that fits the content of the post, I can use that in the card usually generated by social media when you add a link to a post. Visitors now also don’t have to scroll through my entire blog if they look for one particular blog post, as I can share individual links – and you can do that, too!
Alright, enough with the website. Now, I’m back to working on some content for my publications page!
Oh well, the writing. It is not going as planned.
When I started my PhD, I was sure I would write my dissertation in a much more linear and structured way than I had written my Master’s thesis. My Master’s thesis is structured into three main chapters, and I had planned to start with Chapter 1 and then write Chapters 2 and 3, the introduction and the conclusion consecutively. What actually happened, though, was that I started with Chapter 1, but as I read aspects in my fieldnotes or literature that I found interesting for one of the other chapters, I would just continue writing there. In the end, I had a Master’s thesis of around 100 pages consisting of rather disconnected pieces of text, which I needed to revise extensively. I thus finished all chapters at about the same time – a few days before the submission deadline, until which I reread and edited them numerous times in a panicked frenzy.
While time has made me remember this process as quite fun after all, especially knowing in hindsight that everything worked out fine, I decided then and there that I would write my dissertation less chaotically. One of the things I wanted to do differently was how I organized the analysis of my empirical insights and my reading of relevant literature. When I started writing, I already had a clear structure for my Master’s thesis based on the main theoretical concept I used, and this fixed outer structure helped me a lot. However, I had neither systematically analyzed my empirical insights according to this structure, nor had I organized the relevant literature accordingly. And while I enjoyed writing and reading and going back to my fieldnotes at the same time a lot, I think it significantly contributed to my chaotic writing process. After all, neither my fieldnotes nor the relevant literature would adhere to the structure of my thesis, and thus neither did my writing.
So, this time, the plan was to have my empirical insights and relevant text passages from the literature sorted according to the structure of my chapters beforehand, in order to stick to the same old plan of starting with Chapter 1 and writing everything else in consecutive order. I hoped to get several advantages out of that. First, that I would not have to rewrite so much in the end. If I could only finish one chapter after the other and revise and edit it directly, that would help me avoid most of the stress in the final phase of writing. Secondly, finishing chapters one after the other would also make it much easier to ask other people to proofread them. Proofreading a few dozen pages every other month and, on my part, working on the feedback, is definitely more manageable than doing this for the entire dissertation all at once.
But then – all those connections are just so fascinating! I developed the chapter structure for my dissertation based on my empirical material, and it follows a logical order that will (hopefully) allow me to present my most important findings in a clear way. At the same time, it is something that I impose on my material, which in itself just doesn’t follow the linear structure of my planned chapters. The aspects I plan to write about in Chapter 7 and those in Chapter 3 are not disparate in the field; they go hand in hand. It is my structure that separates them by four chapters. I discover so many interesting facets of my ethnographic insights in the writing process, which often reach across chapters rather than fit into the conceptual framework of the one I am currently writing.
So, how has my plan to write strictly from beginning to end been going so far? Let me answer with the example of Chapter 7, which I have not started writing yet but which has a dedicated text document of 23 pages. Will I end up with at least 250 pages of text that I have to proofread and edit all at once? I try not to let it come this far, and have not given up hope just yet. Keep your fingers crossed for me.
