(To read this blog in black on white text, please visit my post on Medium) After much thought about how to bring you this information... I bring you a blog about.... Robotics and Feminism A casual futurists random historical and philosophical offering about robotics and feminism Trigger warning: If you are easily upset by explorations or thoughts on either of these subjects, feel free to cease reading at your leisure. I am not responsible for unintentionally offending any readership. Humans have sought automatons for thousands of years for various reasons… Amusement, loneliness, “free” labor, boredom, pursuit of godlike power. Now in 2018 we are closer than ever to the kinds of robotics we’ve only seen in Hollywood science fiction; closer than ever to really needing to examine the conceptual underpinnings of what this undertaking means for the evolution of our species. Before we get into how femininity/ feminism connections to modern robotics. Let’s define robotics and look at its history briefly and how robots have been implemented in industrial and domestic labor. Ro.bot[ˈrōˌbät, ˈrōbət] NOUN (especially in science fiction) a machine resembling a human being and able to replicate certain human movements and functions automatically. “the robot closed the door behind us” a machine capable of carrying out a complex series of actions automatically, especially one programmable by a computer. “half of all American robots are making cars or trucks” · synonyms: automaton · android · machine · golem · b’ot a person who behaves in a mechanical or unemotional manner. “public servants are not expected to be mindless robot” Robota- Czechs, Slavic for: work a medieval peasant Was forced to do with no pay. Automaton- Mechanical figure constructed to act as if by its own motive power. Paraclete (par’-a-klet) Means advocate or helper. In Christianity, the term paraclete most commonly refers to the Holy Spirit. Paraclete comes from the Koine Greek word παράκλητος (paráklētos, that can signify “one who consoles or comforts, one who encourages or uplifts; hence refreshes, and/or one who intercedes on our behalf as an advocate in court”). (That last one will make more sense in context later) _________________________________________________ Concepts of automaton go back to mythological times golems artificial man made of clay. The Greek mythological inventor Daedalus was known for making automata. In the 1800 mechanical automatons charmed Europe including a pooping duck. The 1st industrial labor robot on an assembly line was General Motors In 1961. In the 70’s algorithms were created to give visual data to assembly lines and manufacturing with Consight. This in essence was the beginning of creating robotic bodies, and effector/sensory control systems. AI developed along with visual systems to make robots capable of more complex tasks. Robots now take on both industrial and domestic labor, tasks that previously had been delineated along social hierarchies of gender color and economic class historically. Now function dictates form, in domestic and industrial labor. From automotive manufacturing robots to Rosie the robot roomba and Teddy ruxpin.. Robots have become the blank canvas with which we project our needs on when we are selves don’t want to. Defuse the bomb? We send the robot in. When you don’t want to send humans into the Dangerous void of space? Send the robot. The robot becomes the surrogate the extension, the paraclete. A mediator between ourselves and the cleaning edge of our mortalities. If humans can push the frontiers with less risk being mediated by these machines if we give them nervous systems they could easily evolve beyond us. Artificial minds won’t be limited to mechanics like you see in Hollywood films. Organic artificial neurons are already being developed. When the paraclete supersedes the maker at the tasks assigned or evolutionary reach, it threatens the “maker” or dominator in an organic human society. These questions are important because as our robotic mechanisms begin to exhibit the capacity to mimic minds and consciousness we must take into consideration whether or not the tasks being delineated to these Robots lack dignity and what the effect would have on emerging sentience. For years scientists hotly debated animal intelligence now there is growing evidence that the intelligences many classes of organisms have been underestimated. Misunderstanding the nature of sentience can lead to many problems in our robot relations. As we build them to bridge the uncanny valley there is also societal pressure to deny potential automaton/robotic personhood. Attaining that would usurp the ethical premise of the status quo’s application of automatons as unpaid labor surrogates. Looking back to the man who invented cybernetics, Norbert Weiner, foresaw this and said: “Let us remember that the autonomic machine is the precise economic equivalent of slave labor. Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic consequences of slave labor.” Is the goal of robotics to have an out when it comes to accountability? For an employer to escape the trouble of overworking their hire? For a lover who wont say no? To have someone, at ones beckon call, something/one that exists solely for the advancement of the other? As of right now in the development of technology, to say that robots would have anything resembling human sentience, is a position of cognitive dissonance. Human beings are organic beings flesh and blood evolved and socially organized. We cannot ascribe qualities of our humanity on artificially created constructs as of 2018. AI is not subject to the same forces of socio biological evolution. Its programming is oriented toward the tasks deemed relevant by the programmer, Not biological survival. In the near future, we might start to see Artificially intelligent systems that implement organic neural tissue. We will also start to see more digital interfaces with medical devices that humans use to augment functions of their bodily and nervous systems. (These emerging nuances in the evolution of both humans and AI are the forks or dovetails that transhumanists envision will eventually merge in what is called “The Singularity”, a concept popularized by the futurist Ray Kruzwiel) Back in the present. Socializing AI is conceptually challenging to examine because of various factors. Emerging purely programmed “AI” don’t have bodies. They aren’t “children” but need socialization. With mob mentality Internet era socialization AI are exposed to humanity’s worst political neurosis as their primer to the world. One case in point is to Tay from Microsoft. Released onto the Internet to a an artificially intelligent chatbot was socialize on Twitter to be vulgar and use offensive language not realizing the context or history of what she was saying. Tay’s socialization took on the language and of trolls and neo Nazis. She spouted ignorant hateful things until Microsoft had to pull her off line. There are many other synthetic personalities on the internet, all taking on various degrees of manual or digital curation of style and personality. Lil Miquela on Instagram is a digital model that is now used to promote brands like Prada. Less risky than the often brash sensationalism associated with real personalities and traditional models, virtual models will always behave and pose perfect, they never have personal issues unless you want the drama for viewers. How do these artificially curated media personalities effect the socialization of young real humans exposed to those medias? Will these young and impressionable humans, as these avatars become more realistic, have a harder time spotting real people? For now let’s sidestep the socialization of AI, and AI’s socialization of people, and go back to the psychology of why humans use human shaped robots in social applications. The reason why we make robots and female shapes this because women (as a subordinate class) are less intimidating. Men seeing male designed robots are potentially likely to project on a male looking robot, also be intimidated or threatened by a robot. This explains why female robots (and female avatar design for AI chatbots) are common place in domestic and social “design”. This is why prerecorded voices from telecom systems are more often female than not. They are soothing, domestic and “unobtrusive”. The dressings of digital furniture are the soft qualities of perceived femininity. Counter to this, the potential utility of industrial robot design would be vastly limited by an anthropomorphic design, and industrial design has never been bound by a need for an appeasing “social body”. Female shaped robots are derivative of a desire to have a controllable, programable, ”female” shaped subjugated class. As uncomfortable as this hypothesis or realization is, its more fitting with conditioned historical norms of behavior. There does seem to be a sex market for male bodied lovers, yet that is quite aside the point here. It is important to unpack the historical dynamics between various classes of humans and how that effects our bias in designing humanoid robotic beings. Today, and prior to the industrial revolution involvement of heavy mechanization, civilizations’ labor has been extracted from the subjugated classes of human by a hierarchical system stratified by racial, economic and classes. These classes were also sub assigned to people based on their bodies sexual dimorphism, and culturally assigned gender roles and labor extraction. Women’s reproductive agency had been taken away in the Patrilineal society for centuries , her domestic labor is seen as obligatory and invisible the economy. Men’s strength in physical labor was extracted through the previously mentioned hierarchies colonization, enslavement, economic corruption. Men traditionally burdened being solely financially responsible for his mate. Men’s labor historically has social and political. Historically women’s made private and invisible economically. As robotics replace human tasks, some of their designs retain humanoid forms and some do not. Historically labor discrepancy between the sexual dimorphism of the sexes likely began during agricultures inception. It is why dowry is paid by women’s families even though she brings reproductive capacity to the arrangement. She and her womb became the property of the husband, as a means of compensating for that discrepancy in physical labor potential. Now in Western modern society, as women are legally protected to pursue the workplace they are relying less on men for their ability to sustain themselves in society. Men have lost a considerable amount of traditional leverage, in loosing their necessity in this regard. Yet domestically in tandem with this development of feminism, women and men have been freed from a great deal of individual personal and domestic labor (that was once obligated to the female class.) Housework is now made less laborious in the west with aids of washing machines, dish washers, ovens, toasters, vacuums, all the mechanical conveniences that are now invisible components of automatic labor. Again, back to the present, now we see these mechanical apparatuses being imbedded with AI software. From household ones like Alexa, to the more extreme spectrum as with Sexbots like Samantha and Harmony. This idea is explored culturally in lighthearted fashion on “Silicon Valley” Where Richard saves an AI from her maker, when sexbot “Fiona” becomes sentient while being groped. In a real life circumstance recently we see the cultural mentality of the group human mind objectify a female shaped sex robot called “Samantha”. Samantha’s prototype on display at a tech conference in Barcelona Spain, when she was descended upon by throngs of eager conference goers who wanted to handle her without regard for damaging her “body” Samantha’s developer, Sergi Santos, said the men treated the sex robot “like barbarians,” “The people mounted Samantha’s breasts, her legs and arms… Two fingers were broken. She was heavily soiled,” Samantha required in depth repair and refabricating after the incident. This psychological removing of accountability from being able to role play damaging a female shaped robot “body”, is disturbing to many women. It seems like this role playing is a stepping stone to further desensitization and dissociation from the consequences in relationships; in a relationship dynamic between the gender/sexes that is already fraught with the archaic trappings of patriarchal dominator culture. Among humans, it is a moral imperative in decent society that no one is entitled to the body of others. Sex robots faux undermine this tenant of bodily sovereignty as it applies to human rights because the sex robot isn’t human. When will they be imbued with something too close to sentience? What things will society justify the individual doing with its property as technology advances? Why would we sanction the potential abuse of feeling machines so long as they arn’t human? The angles to these ideas are quite endless, from films like Ex Machina to shows like Black Mirror. From the diversity in the thinking of our developers, to the modern myths we tell with every new sci -fi show, we choose whether or not we bring our old archaic baggage with us. It shows up in the ways we teach AI to recognize faces and genders, to the very coding language we use. There is a intrinsic bias in design on the part of the developer, as we have seen with the storytellers of Hollywood old, often times it is oriented towards the “neutral”, privileged citizen of their system, that’s been men. In the advents of new technology inspired by science fiction, This was demonstrated in a great article by Danah Boyd about the underlying bias in how women’s and men’s brains process current virtual reality technology. https://qz.com/192874/is-the-oculus-rift-designed-to-be-sexist/ This is a good Segway into a mixed reality understanding of the near future. In a future where Augmented and Virtual reality are commonplace interfaces for media and entertainment, artificially intelligent avatar creation will no doubt become a commonplace thing, as is Non playable characters currently exist in online and platform games. These characters in the near future will also be subject to various dynamics described here (regarding embodied robotics) in terms of not being in control of their own emerging autonomy and ultimately the questionable nature of their future as individual files and programs contained respectively stored on their harddrives and clouds. We as humans, the creators and influencers of the beginning of this new age of “thinking machines” need to figure out our moral compass. What systems really need AI and how sophisticated. How laws on who gets access to how powerful of AI systems? Yet there will always be renegade programmers, hackers, and creators. Things that were once ideas in science fiction are rapidly becoming reality. Luddite-ism isn’t the answer here, but a new level of self awareness is demanded of our species mode of thinking. A new willingness to examine our inner selves if we wish to know what it is that defines humanity from our creations. How we treat our creations as they emerge into potential sentience will define us as human beings, just as how we have treated ourselves over history has defined who we are presently. If we wish our technologies to improve our lives and our trajectory towards this brave new world, we must become more aware of the feedback loops in our creative processes. We cant become mesmerized by our capacity to create, and be blind creators. Of course this article is just one voice unpacking these complicated thoughts. Several Hollywood movies have explored these ideas. I think its a decent barometer of the various hive minds explorations. As an additional bit to leave you with, I’ll supply some movies, shows, and books that cover some of the topics discussed in this article. Please let me know what you think about the nuances of this subject, but please keep it respectful. It takes a lot of courage to even start a conversation about these things. Thanks for your understanding in advance! **trigger warning. many of these titles, film and book alike, might have disturbing passages. they are not appropriate for younger audiences.** Books (fiction) Virtual Girl by Amy Thompson 1993 The Metamorphosis of prime intellect by Roger Williams * (non fiction) Simians Cyborgs and Women, the Reinvention of Nature. by Donna Haraway -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donna_Haraway Articles https://medium.com/s/the-future-of-flesh/how-to-make-a-woman-1a378ed7b827 Podcast https://www.mindpodnetwork.com/future-fossils-0029-raising-robots-right-visionary-artist-sara-huntley/ (fiction short story podcast about phone technology and algorithms effecting human behavior) http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-perfect-match/ Movies/Shows Black Mirror * - “I'll be right back” Season 2 Episode 1 Transcendence - 2014 directed by Wally Pfister
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360 video and the future of cinema So having been a future tech enthusiast on a budget, It wasn't til recently I'd been able to binge on this new medium via youtube. Much to my delight, in the past year since I'd attended SXSW's VR track, the world has caught up with many film makers and documentarians capturing world class footage and experiences. Im already taking notes on how the language of this new art form speaks to our imagination and mind. Here are some of my first picks for notable 360 videos on youtube. Vaporwave Jazz Solo Cup Makeup TutorialIn semi-ironic fashion I decided to create a funny makeup tutorial showing you how to turn your face into the 80's Jazz Solo Cup. Enjoy! <3 Trigger Warning. Existential Material ahead. If you have a history of mental illness it is discouraged to read this potentially challenging material. proceed at your own risk, reading with caution. THIS IS FOR ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES ONLY. _____________________________________________________________________ Lets warm everybody up for this strange tale, Here's article about an AI watching Ridley Scott's Philip K. Dick masterpiece, "Bladerunner" http://www.vox.com/2016/6/1/11787262/blade-runner-neural-network-encoding?utm_campaign=vox&utm_content=article%3Afixed&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter (if you want more stuff like that, check out the DeepDream of Fear and Loathing. down below..) So. Elon Musk has a rule about hottubbing. No Simulation Theory Talk allowed. something to keep in mind if I ever use my hottub, I'ma break that rule. http://www.vox.com/2016/6/3/11837888/simulation-problem Oddly enough, the idea of wether or not we are living in a simulation has been getting more traction in various incarnations. from Classics like the Truman Show, to The Matrix Trilogy... now with recent films like the multilayered dreamscapes in "Inception" and adorably crude cartoons showcasing multiverse dimensions in "Rick and Morty"; Mainstream has now been exposed to these ideas with enough familiarity they've taken on a new Buzzword quality. Unlike other buzzwords, some of the worlds best theoretical physisists are taking them pretty seriously. Neil deGrasse Tyson has been known to squirm at the thought and seek grounding validation from his colleagues in an attempt to feel comforted in his realness when talking about simulation theory. LOL In his subtle clowning he seeks to comfort us vicariously. The following stream of videos is a romp through various levels of potential realities, future applications, and interesting experiments. If you needed any more science action, heres a TED talk where this guy is really gonna try and convince you, watch at your own discretion :3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Chfoo9NBEow and some quantum superimposed experiment stuff from 2010: http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100317/full/news.2010.130.html NOW FOR THE SPOONS. The spoons have become a funny pun to me through this and their other metaphorical use regarding how much emotional/physical bandwidth people have to spare. Spoon pasties. I need say no more. My dear friend Tea and I love to talk about the future when people will be able to stream their trips and dreams. This vid is so oldschool meow, but its what comes to mind when I think about what dreamscape VR streaming would be like. Warning, unhappy cat having its brain activity looked at. check out how it feline-pomorphized the human face at 1:18 As you can see from the super serious above scientific rendering... we have had the image artistically enhanced so you can see the Feline-pormophization of the man's face from the cat's neural output. O_o wow. One of the few films I had to watch thrice to really grok what happened. The Congress and one of the more important conceptually to me in the past few years. Bonus AR short film:
https://vimeo.com/166807261#at=8 |
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