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Ages 11-14.

Meets on Zoom on Fridays, 1:00-1:50pm Pacific Time. Starting June 12th, 2020.

Led by Paradox Lab founder, Dr. Iris Oved.

In this 8-week discussion class, students will explore big philosophical puzzles about robots, drawing insights from cognitive science, neuroscience, and robotics.

Refund Policy: Full refund up to 48 hours prior to first session. Pro-rated if request to cancel.

****Note: For this class to work, we must have at minimum 3 students enrolled. If this minimum is not reached by 48 hours prior to the first session, we will cancel and issue a full refund.

Details and Schedule:

Each lesson will include the following 5 parts, commonly used in Philosophy for Children classes (see https://www.montclair.edu/iapc/what-is-philosophy-for-children/).

(1) Stimulus: We will start with a thought experiment, a robot demo, or a science lesson about brains or machines.

(2) Questions: Students will collect a list of questions, generated by the instructor or by the students themselves.

(3) Vote: Students will choose a question to discuss together.

(4) Inquiry: Students will take turns making contributions and labeling them (hypothesis, reason, challenge, assumption, observation, analogy, distinction, clarification, etc.), calling on one another, and filling out an Inquiry Diagram to map the discussion.

(5) Evaluate: Students will then reflect on the discussion, sharing whether they felt heard, felt that they listened, and thought it was productive, fair, open, and respectful.

Below are the weekly topics:

WEEK 1: Introductions. Ground Rules for Inquiry. Lesson on androids and emotions. Could robots ever feel love?

WEEK 2: Simple Robots. Learn about the parts --sensors, motors, processor, software. Compare and contrast these robots with humans. Do these robots have brains? Do they have minds?

WEEK 3: Aibo, Sony's robotic pet dog. Could Aibo ever understand the word "sit"? Could it ever experience the color pink? Could it ever really be a "good doggie"?

WEEK 4: Lesson on Vision in Aibo, humans, dogs, bees, snakes, bats, mantis shrimp, fruit fly. Could we ever know what it's like to be someone/something else? Could we ever know if a robot has conscious experience?

WEEK 5: Thoughts and Thought Processing. Read Terry Bison's "They are Made out of Meat". Compare and contrast computing and thought processing.

WEEK 6: Language. The Turing Test. Could a robot ever really understand language?

WEEK 7: Moral Responsibilities of Robots. Can robots be held responsible for their actions?

WEEK 8: Moral Responsibilities of Humans to Robots. Will humans ever have to take the needs and feelings of robots into consideration in decision making?

Learning Goals: Students will learn how to think about philosophical puzzles about robots and learn some of the relevant science about brains and robots. More importantly, students will experience the process of doing inquiry in a group, learn how to formulate questions, entertain multiple hypotheses, find reasons and challenges for the hypotheses, and learn how to evaluate evidence. They will also gain skills for self-reflection, self-expression, listening, and perspective-taking.