Winders will direct the new institute, employing her proven knack for convening researchers around interdisciplinary ideas. Syracuse University’s great advantage, she says, is its interdisciplinary reach. “SU is taking a very broad approach to autonomous systems.” The University draws on strengths in design, public communications, business, public health, engineering and science, the humanities, and public policy. Plus, social scientists will look at “how this emerging, disruptive technology will change daily life,” she says.

Over six months, Winders held group meetings with 90-plus faculty members across SU, and similar meetings with nearly 100 government, nonprofit, and industry representatives outside SU. She gauged interest, identified research opportunities, and began to tease out curricular ideas.

A sampling of interested professors illustrates the topic’s breadth. At the University, industrial design professor Louise Manfredi studies how human-centered product design might serve AS. The iSchool’s Ingrid Erickson researches the “rhetoric of safety” as it relates to AS, and teaches a course on how A.I. and algorhythmic prediction will affect information-science careers. Architect Bess Krietemeyer studies automated systems and building design. At Maxwell, PA professor Tina Nabatchi has helped conduct community workshops on concerns about drones. Geographer Jane Read co-teaches a course, with Earth scientist Christa Kelleher, on drone use in research, its social impact, and other legal and ethical issues.

For University students, ASPI will bear almost limitless possibilities. Winders imagines new courses and interdisciplinary majors, grad and undergrad research, internships, and possible certificates.

Even ASPI’s pre-launch phase had impact for two students. Lily Datz, a freshman from Skaneateles, N.Y., prepared an audit of autonomous-related work being done at other universities, and she assembled an AS bibliography. “There’s nothing as cross-disciplinary at other universities,” Datz says. “Professor Winders really wants to involve faculty from every single school on campus.”

MPA/cybersecurity grad student Matthew Mittelsteadt, from Minneapolis, prepared white papers on topics in AS — current-state and emerging-idea briefings for stakeholders now joining the ASPI fold. One was on armed drones, for example. They’re human-guided today, but might someday “pull the trigger themselves.” Though the United Nations is attempting to forge policy, Mittelsteadt found no accepted international standards for the use of armed drones. “It’s the Wild West as far as I can tell,” he says. At a day-long conference where ASPI was formally introduced, Chancellor Syverud, too, described an array of wide-open questions, related to privacy, social equity, legality, cultural norms, etc. “The answers are going to come not just from one narrow part of a university or a company,” he said. “They’re going to come from scholars, advocates, policymakers, industry experts of all disciplines working together.”

“Our ecosystems, our economies, our cities, our social systems are not going to adjust to these technologies one at a time,” he later said. “. . . The institute really needs to be broadminded in what it’s looking at and ready to be nimble and adaptable.”

The great advantage of ASPI, says Van Slyke, is foresight. Typically, policy lags behind new technology, arrives only in the wake of a problem, and is delivered top-down and heavy-handed. But with ASPI, “we can begin to anticipate how autonomous systems might play out,” he says, “before they actually do.”

By Dana Cooke

This article appeared in the spring 2019 print edition of Maxwell Perspective © Maxwell School of Syracuse University.