Tom Williams

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...

Purdue student detained by ICE and taken to troubled Louisiana holding facility Yeonsoo Go, 20, was detained after her immigration hearing in Manhattan and taken away by ICE agents.

Go, a college student, has a dependent visa (her mother, an Episcopal minister, is here on a religious worker visa), which doesn't expire until Dec. But when she tried to renew it early, ICE nabbed her and sent her halfway across the US to a detention center.
www.wthr.com/article/news...

To whom it may concern, and it should concern the editor: I was quoted in your publication: https://cosmosmagazine.com/earth/oceans/can-we-engineer-our-way-out-of-ocean-acidification/ Still, others aren't convinced that good intentions are enough. Dr. David Ho, Professor of Oceanography at University of Hawaii at Manoa, a cofounder and the Chief Science Officer of |C|Worthy, a non-profit that works on verifying ocean-based carbon dioxide removal, believes carbon removal efforts like ocean alkalinity enhancement shouldn't be left solely in the hands of private companies. "They have no way to prove that what they're doing is effective - that's a big problem," Dr Ho said. The crux of the dilemma, he explains, is that we are fighting a planetary-scale problem, but are doing it with tools that are still being built and tested. Geoengineering is not inherently good or bad, but it is inherently powerful. And power, especially when exercised in ecosystems as complex and fragile as the ocean, must be handled with caution. However, I have never spoken to your reporter, nor would I have said those things. I would like you to remove my quote from your story, and issue a public correction and apology. Furthermore, you should look into whether the other parts of the article are also factually correct. Thanks. d.

WTF? I was quoted in this story but I have never spoken to the reporter nor would I have said those things. Is everything just generated by LLMs these days?

cosmosmagazine.com/earth/oceans...

Columbia University Settlement an Unprecedented Disaster Never in the history of our nation has a university so thoroughly bent to the will of an autocrat. All who care about higher education must stand up and fight back against this unprecedented continuin...

"Never in the history of our nation has an educational institution so thoroughly bent to the will of an autocrat"

www.aaup.org/news/columbi...

Oops should have tagged @cardiffuni.bsky.social I think. Was not at the library but looks nice!

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!

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...

Degrees of Freedom Update 4: "The Where" and Second Preorder Sale! Where I wrote the book, Where to buy the book at 35% off, how to read it for free.

New Newsletter Post: "The Where" of Degrees of Freedom, and Second Preorder Sale! tomwilliamsphd.beehiiv.com/p/degrees-of...

I'm back in Bristol for four weeks! In this post I reflect on the history of Bristol, and how its efforts to correct for its legacy of slavery parallel themes in my book.

Again, you lied to your readers about your source. You falsely called him “an academic” and whitewashed the fact that he is a known proponent of racist eugenics — all while promoting his Substack with a hyperlink and striking a deal to obscure his publicly reported identity.

Who's Afraid of Zohran Mamdani? And what it means to be an immigrant on July 4th

New, from me:
The Times published a piece accusing a man born in Africa as claiming to be African-American in a failed college admission.

They viewed this story to be newsworthy enough to grant anonymity to a eugenicist working with hacked personal data.
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/whos-afrai...

it’s absurd that NYT forced him to delete these skeets, which … convey the factual information that Zohran Mamdani is, in fact, a man of South Asian descent who was born and raised in Africa, and that the pseudonymous source of the hacked material is a white supremacist eugenicist.

Why TF isn’t anyone talking about the $75 BILLION for ICE?

Every city will look like Los Angeles - with masked kidnappers snatching our friends and neighbors.

From current budget of $3.5 billion to $75 BILLION ❗️

$30b for hired thugs.
$45b for concentration camps.

Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur and author of this new report

"Corporate relations w/ Israel must cease until occupation + apartheid end + reparations are made. The corporate sector, including its executives, must be held to account, as a necessary step towards ending the genocide + disassembling the global system of racialized capitalism that underpins it."

this is dred scott

The Republican Justices Are Simply Doing What the Republican President Asks The position of the Roberts Court is that presidents are sometimes allowed to break the law, but only if they are Republicans.

Hard to overstate how insane it makes you feel to read a Supreme Court decision that very seriously concludes that there is not a sufficient “history and tradition” to allow judges to stop the president from ignoring the Constitution ballsandstrikes.org/scotus/trump...

UK friends! I'll be in Bristol for basically all of July. Please reach out if you'd like me to come 1️⃣ give a book preview talk, 2️⃣ run a robot TTRPG session, 3️⃣ run a robot design improv workshop!

Forced Labor Continues in Colorado, Years After Vote to End Prison Slavery  Coloradans voted in 2018 to amend their state constitution to ban forced labor in prison. Years later, incarcerated people are still being punished for refusing work assignments.

Assigned to a prison job paying $0.13 per hour, Abron Arrington refused to work, figuring his time could be better spent learning physics.

The Colorado DOC punished him with bouts of solitary confinement. boltsmag.org/colorad...

Socialism is what they called public power.

Socialism is what they called social security. 
 
Socialism is what they called the growth of free and independent labor organizations.
 
Socialism is their name for almost anything that helps all the people.

—Harry Truman, 1952

Our results show that (with the exception of strategies like filming) participants dispreferred robot to human intervention. Moreover, the paper shows a need to consider police-led violence as a special case of robot de-escalation, and to involve communities in the design of public space robots./end

We consider multiple types of violence (verbal, physical), sources of violence (civilian, police), and robot designs (wheeled, humanoid), and analyzed their relationship with participants’ perceptions. 3/

Our motivation for this work was the question: what should public space robots do when they witness verbal or physical violence? We investigated whether people
believed delivery robots should intervene in such cases, and their thoughts on different conflict de-escalation strategies. 2/

Incredibly grateful to have gotten to be a part of the new paper led by Tilly Seassau, Wenxi Wu, and @martimbrandao.bsky.social:

"Should Delivery Robots Intervene if They Witness Civilian or Police Violence? An Exploratory Investigation"

mirrorlab.mines.edu/publications...

(🧵)

My hate for Roll20 as a part of the ecosystem grows ever larger you dont have to 'both sides' something being anti-nazi fucking hell

if you've had a shitty week, here's the fantastic news you needed:

solar is SO efficient now that nothing else really comes close. Solar farms like this- under which other countries plant crops that thrive in the controlled bright shade- are the easy future.

this makes me sleep okay at night 😌

near Union station in Denver (@ XIV). cops have set off what seems to smoke bombs & tear gas at a small cluster quiet of protestors. We’re evacuating a roof top bar, people at this #ica25 reception are throwing up, streaked w/ tears & seeking refuge inside. If you’re in the area, get inside.

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For more and the book:
- Web: TomWilliams.phd/book
- Newsletter: TomWilliamsPhD.beehiiv.com
- Preorder: mitpress.mit.edu/978026255402...
(Reminder: the book will be available to read for free digitally once released)

Thank you Dylan Thomas Doyle for having me on the AI-tocracy pod, to talk about "Degrees of Freedom" from The MIT Press and the related research our group has been doing at Colorado School of Mines!

youtu.be/YGp0fvo5VYw

open.spotify.com/episode/0YLH...

podcasts.apple.com/in/podcast/j...

Trump Says Army Bases Will Revert to Confederate Names The move would reverse a yearslong effort to remove names and symbols honoring the Confederacy from the military.

Violating the law to honor America's traitors
www.nytimes.com/2025/06/10/u...