iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Tom Williams @tomwilliams.phd · 22/01/2026

Getting served a RING add on this story about Flock cameras being operated in Denver despite the lack of a legal contract is just too perfect. I discuss Ring and police surveillance in Chapter 6 of Degrees of Freedom. direct.mit.edu/books/oa-mon...

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Tom Williams @tomwilliams.phd · 12/12/2025

Another reason to call for #NoJusticeNoRobots! I discuss the significant surveillance risks of police drone programs in Chapter 6 ("End Effector") of my new book, "Degrees of Freedom" from @mitpress.bsky.social www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/798105...

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Tom Williams @tomwilliams.phd · 12/12/2025

Excited to say that I'll be running more robot comedy events this spring! ROBOT RIOT brings together roboticists, ethicists, and some of Denver's funniest comedians, to inform the public about risks of AI and Robotics while making them laugh. Our first show is 2/6/26:

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Tom Williams @tomwilliams.phd · 09/12/2025

IT'S OUT! Degrees of Freedom is out on shelves as of today! TODAY ONLY the book is 30% off with code MITP30 at www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/798105.... Please share! If you got a copy, please post about it on your favorite platform, and tag me and MIT Press!

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Tom Williams @tomwilliams.phd · 08/12/2025

Degrees of Freedom (@mitpress.bsky.social) launches tomorrow! As a final preview, check out my episode of @theinternetiscrack.bsky.social! Other recent guests incl. @pluralistic.net.web.brid.gy, @michaelzimmer.bsky.social, @davidgunkel.bsky.social Watch: lnkd.in/gbTh5vvj Listen: lnkd.in/ge9hy7Qd

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Tom Williams @tomwilliams.phd · 02/12/2025

We're one week from release of Degrees of Freedom, from @mitpress.bsky.social! tomwilliamsphd.beehiiv.com/p/degrees-of...

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Tom Williams @tomwilliams.phd · 23/11/2025

It's unboxing day for DEGREES OF FREEDOM from @mitpress.bsky.social! :D

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Tom Williams @tomwilliams.phd · 22/11/2025

1. STEMProv: a local (Black woman led!) improv group that will be reforming to do their first show since before the pandemic: a longform improv set inspired by a monologue from Naomi Fitter, with periodic interventions from a robot from my lab!

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Tom Williams @tomwilliams.phd · 22/11/2025

2. Subtext Improv (yes that's me in the back --- my profile picture is from the same photoshoot!) improvising a sci-fi novel! With two new members performing for their first time!

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Tom Williams @tomwilliams.phd · 22/11/2025

3. My Mines colleague @estellesmithphd.bsky.social, a longtime singer and comedian, roasting AI in song.

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Tom Williams @tomwilliams.phd · 22/11/2025

4. Robot themed improv group Not My Robot, who have previously come to my robotics classes to help teach student improv-based robot design principles, doing an even more roboty set than normal 🤖

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Tom Williams @tomwilliams.phd · 22/11/2025

The show will feature (in reverse order): 5. Headliner Naomi Fitter from @oregonstate.edu doing standup with her robot, who autonomously adjusts its joke delivery (all human written jokes!) based on audience response. Naomi gave a killer seminar on her robot comedy research yesterday at Mines.

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Tom Williams @tomwilliams.phd · 22/11/2025

I'm wildly excited for tonight. Why? I'm running my first ROBOT COMEDY event tonight and it's already SOLD OUT! Check out this lineup 🤩🧵➡️

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Tom Williams @tomwilliams.phd · 13/11/2025

Thank you @umich.edu Robotics for hosting me today to talk about my forthcoming book! One of the most rewarding campus visits I've ever had in terms of sheer number of identified collaboration opportunities for proposals and papers!

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Tom Williams @tomwilliams.phd · 09/11/2025

*Degrees of Freedom* from @mitpress.bsky.social will be on shelves ONE MONTH FROM TODAY! To celebrate, I have a new newsletter post out (tomwilliamsphd.beehiiv.com/p/degrees-of...) re: how to get 30% off the book on release, and 20% off the book any date thereafter.

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Tom Williams @tomwilliams.phd · 03/10/2025

New version of our lab's robot TTRPG /Hello World, I'm Sorry/ launching soon!

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Tom Williams @tomwilliams.phd · 15/08/2025

Very excited for our lab's forthcoming #IROS2025 paper! Extremely cool work from @renazhu.bsky.social et al. "That’s Iconic! Designing Augmented Reality Iconic Gestures To Enhance Multi-modal Communication For Morphologically Limited Robots" mirrorlab.mines.edu/publications... 🧵

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Tom Williams @tomwilliams.phd · 11/08/2025

We now have a cover for my forthcoming book, *Degrees of Freedom: On Robotics and Social Justice*! (@mitpress.bsky.social, 2025) In this newsletter post, I talk about the cover, and explain its significance: tomwilliamsphd.beehiiv.com/p/degrees-of... Pre-order: mitpress.mit.edu/978026255402...

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Tom Williams @tomwilliams.phd · 23/07/2025

Diolch y'n fawr iawn Christopher Wallbridge for hosting me for a seminar at @cardiffunilib.bsky.social to discuss Degrees of Freedom (@mitpress.bsky.social)! So much amazing work going on at Cardiff HCC right now --- looking forward to finding ways to collaborate!

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Tom Williams @tomwilliams.phd · 22/07/2025

I've received final proofs from @mitpress.bsky.social for Degrees of Freedom! To celebrate, I've published a newsletter post exploring the full timeline to write this book. Read the post: tomwilliamsphd.beehiiv.com/p/degrees-of... Pre-order: mitpress.mit.edu/978026255402...

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Tom Williams @tomwilliams.phd · 27/05/2025

Excited to join the AI-tocracy pod's summer speaker series! On 6/5 at 9AM MT I'll be discussing my book "Degrees of Freedom: On Robotics and Social Justice" from @mitpress.bsky.social. Check ai-tocracy.org next week to learn more, and subscribe on Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts!

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Tom Williams @tomwilliams.phd · 20/05/2025

Thanks to everyone who came to the #ICRA robot ethics forum, and to the great speakers and panelists who made it such a success!

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Tom Williams @tomwilliams.phd · 19/05/2025

Robotics friends: Will you be at #icra? Curious about my forthcoming book, Degrees of Freedom from @mitpress.bsky.social? Come to the Robot Ethics Forum tomorrow, which we'll be kicking off with a Book Preview Talk on Degrees of Freedom!

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Tom Williams @tomwilliams.phd · 07/05/2025

I'm extremely proud of Dr. Alexa Bejarano for winning this year's Dr. Bhakta Rath and Sushama Rath Research Award: the Colorado School of Mines' for the dissertation with the greatest perceived potential for future societal impact. 1/

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Tom Williams @tomwilliams.phd · 01/05/2025

Finally got my copy of Ericka Johnson's "How that robot made me feel" from @mitpress.bsky.social! Grateful for the opportunity to review+blurb this wonderful book!

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Tom Williams @tomwilliams.phd · 28/04/2025

Thanks to the lab for a great year of research!

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Tom Williams @tomwilliams.phd · 23/04/2025

"Degrees of Freedom: On Robotics and Social Justice" from @mitpress.bsky.social is available for pre-order... and on sale thru Friday! The PDF will be *free* at launch, but if you want a physical copy I strongly recommend you preorder through @barnesandnoble (bit.ly/dof-bn) with code PREORDER25.

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Tom Williams @tomwilliams.phd · 22/04/2025

Page Proofs for *Degrees of Freedom: on Robotics and Social Justice* from The MIT Press are done!!! All 346 pages reviewed and final proofreading changes made, after a ton of work over this past week. 😴 There's even bigger news about the book, but I'm not allowed to share it until tomorrow. 😊

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Tom Williams @tomwilliams.phd · 22/04/2025

This is vile. NIH declaring grant recipients must agree not to operate, unrelated to the grant, any programs that advocate for DEIA, and not to engage in Israeli Boycotts. Blatantly illegal. Will universities sue?

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Tom Williams @tomwilliams.phd · 21/04/2025

Finishing proofing the penultimate chapter of Degrees of Freedom from @mitpress.bsky.social. This chapter, End Effector, is probably my favorite, and goes the hardest, as it calls for an abolitionist robotics.

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

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Tom Williams @tomwilliams.phd · 18/04/2025

Proofed Chapters 3-5 of "Degrees of Freedom" (tomwilliams.phd/book) on this very snowy day (cc @mitpress.bsky.social!) A wild shift in weather from yesterday, but #ThatsSoColorado for ya. 53 pages of main text left! Next up is the chapter I focused on at the IUPRA Symposium two weeks back...

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Tom Williams @tomwilliams.phd · 18/04/2025

Two chapters of /Degrees of Freedom/ proofed, five to go. I'm so excited for people to read this book! Book: tomwilliams.phd/book Newsletter: tomwilliamsphd.beehiiv.com/

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Tom Williams @tomwilliams.phd · 18/04/2025

Another example for your list: I made the GPT = Frankfurtian Bullshit argument in 2020. Technically this paper was submitted in 2019. mirrorlab.mines.edu/publications...

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Tom Williams @tomwilliams.phd · 17/04/2025

The park next to my house is a beautiful place to sit and review page proofs that critique AI ❤️

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Tom Williams @tomwilliams.phd · 16/04/2025

Proud of the MIRRORLab undergrads who presented at the @coschoolofmines.bsky.social Undergrad Research Symposium today!

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Tom Williams @tomwilliams.phd · 14/04/2025

I normally keep this type of stuff off of Blue Sky, but this one's big! If you have friends in Denver, tell them to get tickets to Sat's LGL before they run out! It's our new monthly musical comedy variety show, with stand up, clown, and of course, improv! risecomedy.crowdwork.com/shows/let-s-...

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Tom Williams @tomwilliams.phd · 11/04/2025

Page proofs are in from @mitpress.bsky.social for "Degrees of Freedom"! Time to start the final read through these ~215 pages of content and ~140 pages of references and notes!

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Tom Williams @tomwilliams.phd · 10/04/2025

Thank you to Laura Stegner from University of Wisconsin-Madison for giving a wonderful talk at Colorado School of Mines today on her work on robot interaction design and end-user programming in care facilities!

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Tom Williams @tomwilliams.phd · 28/03/2025

Congratulations to the new Dr. Alexandra Bejarano, who successfully defended her thesis today, "Understanding Users' Mental Models of Flexibly Configurable Multi-Robot Systems"! Dr. Bejarano will be joining @qinzhu.bsky.social's lab as a Postdoctoral scholar this summer.

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Tom Williams @tomwilliams.phd · 10/03/2025

Copyedits for Degrees of Freedom reviewed and approved from my hotel in Sydney. Next stop page proofs!

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Tom Williams @tomwilliams.phd · 06/03/2025

It was an extremely special end to #HRI2025 to see The Robot Dog at Melbourne Theatre: a play about robot ethics, HRI, grief, and culture.

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Tom Williams @tomwilliams.phd · 06/03/2025

Congratulations to Nyomi Morris for winning Best Paper Runner Up in the Design Track at HRI! It's our lab's first(ish) HRI Best Paper nominee, and I believe our first paper ever in the Design Track. mirrorlab.mines.edu/publications...

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Tom Williams @tomwilliams.phd · 05/03/2025

Heck yeah. @yolandestreng.bsky.social calling for more attention to Sociotechnical Imaginaries in the final keynote of #HRI2025!

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Tom Williams @tomwilliams.phd · 05/03/2025

Extremely proud of @coschoolofmines.bsky.social PhD student Nyomi Morris for crushing her first conference talk, on the main stage at #HRI2025!

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Tom Williams @tomwilliams.phd · 04/03/2025

Wonderful start to the day at #HRI2025 as Randy Gomez discusses the thoughtful, empathy-driven, socially minded approach to robot design at Honda Research!

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Tom Williams @tomwilliams.phd · 04/03/2025

Wonderful start to the day at #HRI2025 as Randy Gomez discusses the thoughtful, empathy-driven, socially minded approach to robot design at Honda Research!

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Tom Williams @tomwilliams.phd · 04/03/2025

Wonderful talk from Laetitia Tanqueray thinking about the support social robots could provide for young carers. #HRI2025

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Tom Williams @tomwilliams.phd · 04/03/2025

Michael Xu presenting interesting work on how robots can facilitate diary studies! (The hits keep coming in this session!) #HRI2025

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