In this article the author, Jennifer Robertson, studies the current landscape of robotics in Japan, and provides insights into how robots can embody ideas and notions of the relationship in humans between sex and gender roles, and how this embodiment can reflect back on society and social norms. This is of course one of many topics covered in the article but it is the one I will be reflecting on in this post.

She starts of by explaining that “gender is both a concept and performance embodied by females and males, a corporeal technology that is produced dialectically” i.e. it is simultaneously a characteristic of the material body and of the semiotic systems within which bodies exist. 

She goes further to describe that the relationship between genitals and gender attribution is reflexive. “The reality of a gender is ‘proved’ by the genital which is attributed, and, at the same time, the attributed genital only has meaning through the socially shared construction of the gender attribution process.”

This reflexive relationship combined with the prevalence of gendered robots in Japan means that through gender attribution, roboticists have a hand in constructing the social norms in Japan and can reinforce quite unprogressive notions of gender roles. The result of this “reality construction” is that the relationship between human bodies and genders – which is essentially a contingent one- is transformed into a rigid one. The robots they produce end up being a form of “retro-tech i.e. new technologies that facilitate the transcendence of ethnocentrism, paternalism and sexism, and their associated power relations.”

Robots are perceived by many Japanese citizens, especially the elderly and conservative politicians, as “eliminating the sociocultural anxieties provoked by foreign laborers and caretakers.” Humanoid robots are also preferred over immigrants as caretakers of children and elderly persons to assist housewives, thereby supposedly freeing them to stay home and have more children.

This assumption disregards the idea that Japanese women’s refusal to marry and their reluctance to have children, constitutes a form of protest against a social system that regards women as second-class citizens. This is evidenced in the fact that women’s standard of living falls dramatically once they marry since they are expected to do all the housework and also end up losing two-thirds of their disposable income. “It seems that this unprecedented exercise of self-interested agency, accompanied by a generalized antagonism toward migrant workers, has occasioned a societal environment facilitating the robotization of work, play and home-life.”

Robertson, J. (2010). Gendering humanoid robots: Robo-sexism in japan. Body & Society, 16(2), 1-36.

There is a prevalent notion that in the future, machines will replace human labour and humans will become “not just unemployed, but unemployable” since we won’t be able to compete with machines’ productivity levels. The videos I’ve linked below present different views about the future of work and how it may be shaped by technological advancements and A.I.

The first video by Vox holds the stance that despite the fact that many jobs will likely die, work will still persist. They describe how it’s really easy to see the jobs being replaced by machines but it’s a lot harder to visualize what happens next i.e. job creation. Replacing human labor with mechanical muscles frees people to specialize in better jobs thereby increasing the population’s standard of living. Another common argument is that humans have gone through this before during the industrial and agricultural revolutions yet we still have most jobs available to us.

There is also an issue mentioned briefly of there being a gap between the jobs replaced by machines and the jobs created as a result of the increased productivity in terms of time, geography, and skills. The new jobs will in fact be created, but only after a long time and they will likely require much more highly skilled labour which inflicts irreversible damage to the low-skilled people who lost the jobs. So while automation is raising the standard of living for some, it is likely forcing many others into poverty. 

The video named “humans need not apply” pokes holes into these arguments, and emphasizes that this time is fundamentally different because machines don’t just mimic physical work; A.I has given them the power to replicate mental tasks as well. They discuss many different fields where machines are rapidly improving and how they easily have the potential to replace human workers not just in menial jobs but also in professional and creative fields. All of this gives reason to believe that machines can overtake humans as the superior laborers and so the question shifts from can machines replace us to should they replace us?

The 2-part documentary Automation -also linked below- uses the example of self-driving cars to illustrate the devastating effect automation can have on the low-skilled majority of the population if it becomes the norm and gives examples from America’s rust belt to show how labour-saving technology can be harmful. A lot of emphasis is placed on the fact that technological advances aren’t stopping any time soon. In fact, they are increasing exponentially and underestimating this advancement is ignorant at best and catastrophically dangerous at worst. 

However, while the Vox video doesn’t dispute that machines are improving at an unprecedented rate, it presents the case the results of  automation aren’t so straightforward. They site studies that show that labour productivity has been decreasing over the past couple of years and explain that if jobs were truly being taken over by machines, it would correlate with an increase in labour productivity i.e. we would be producing more with less workers. So analyzing the data makes us skeptical of the idea that machines are fundamentally changing our economy.

The question that comes to mind is, what if machines do in fact take over all jobs across all industries? Would that be a bad thing? On one hand people who aren’t business owners, i.e. most people, will no longer have a source of income and will become a burden on society . However it is arguable that automation will afford us freedom from having to “work for a living”; freedom that can possibly allow us to evolve as a society. At first glance it seems that this can’t be anything but good however I find it difficult to imagine such a future. We are all so used to measuring our success and often our value based on our job or how productive we are. In most cases, our jobs can even become an integral part of our identity so without work, what would our purpose be? 

In this unsettling video, former US President Barrack Obama supposedly gives a PSA, warning the public about the prevalence and consequent dangers of fake news. I use use the word unsettling because something about the way his face moves while he’s speaking, as well as his use of inappropriate language, doesn’t seem quite right. The reason for this is quickly discovered when the video reveals that it isn’t actually Obama making this announcement. The person behind the video was actually Oscar-winning filmmaker Jordan Peele – who also has a knack for impressions. Peele had used Adobe After Effects and FakeApp in order to superimpose his lips and the movements of his jaw onto Obama’s face giving a result that would have been believable if it didn’t fall into the infamous uncanny valley. Deepfake media such as this one had been at the center of public discussion once before when they were used to superimpose celebrity faces onto pornographic videos, but this video focuses on their potential as tools to promote the already dire issue of fake news and its effects on the country’s political climate. It also serves as a warning, showing that moving forward we can no longer rely on our senses to tell us the truth. This is because new A.I is providing a way to manipulate the things we see and hear to trick us into believing anything. It is a reminder of the dire need for individuals to improve their media literacy and to be skeptical of the things we see on the internet – no matter how convincing.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/davidmack/obama-fake-news-jordan-peele-psa-video-buzzfeed#.aom2lKDM1K

In 2016, Director Oscar Sharp and A.I researcher Ross Goodwin used “Benjamin”, a type of A.I that is often used for text recognition, to create Sunspring – the first sci-fi movie whose screenplay was written by a machine. To train Benjamin, Goodwin input to it dozens of sci-fi screenplays he found online and Benjamin in turn analyzed them and used them  to predict which letters tended to follow each other and from there, which words and phrases tended to occur together. Over time, Benjamin learned to imitate the structure of a screenplay and produce stage directions as well as well-formatted character lines. They then fed Benjamin the prompts from a 48 hour short-film competition, and the final product was a nonsensical sequence of scenes containing conversations that only vaguely resembled normal human dialogue. Benjamin was also fed a plethora of pop-song lyrics and was then able to write a song to play along with the film – this however was easily mistakable for a real pop song. This surreal film serves as a reminder that despite the existence of incredibly advanced chatbots and technologies such as Siri and Alexa, their ability to mimic human conversations seamlessly doesn’t necessarily reflect any real understanding of the language they use. 

In the interview I’ve linked below, the interviewer raises the question of whether Benjamin should be considered a writer or simply a tool that was used in the writing process. At first, Goodwin stated that its a tool since it didn’t add any original ideas but instead just rearranged a bunch of other movies.However, throughout the interview, Sharp expresses regret that he didn’t have enough time to fully interpret what complicated stage directions such as “He is standing in the stars and sitting on the floor” actually mean. Another topic of interest is that while the film is generally meaningless, it somehow still conveys the same overall feeling a generic sci-fi movie does – down to the implied love triangle. This suggests that there is more to the screenplay than just haplessly arranged words. Whether this is because Benjamin has imbued the screenplay with underling meaning or because we tend to attribute meaning to things in order to comprehend them is not very clear. 

The next year – 2017- they carried out a similar experiment to create another short film called “It’s No Game”. Instead of having Benjamin write the whole thing based on vague prompts, this film depicts a future where A.I can be fed specific material – such as only Shakespeare or only David Hasselhoff movies- and create lines and dialogues that could be input directly to chips in actors neck so it can control them and deliver the lines flawlessly. The process of making this film is more realistic than that of Sunspring as it involves cooperation between humans and A.I where the “technology is augmenting rather than replacing humans” since humans came up with the over all plot and delegated some writing to the A.I. This raises the question of what the integration of A.I in the writing process could mean for how movies are made and judged. If the A.I is given lines from the most prominent characters in a specific genre, it could potentially create the ultimate character based on this input despite not actually creating anything original. Therefore writing can move away from being a process of creation and become an issue of choosing the right inputs ie. A.I can stifle creativity. The opposite is also possible where screenplay writers will be freed from the tedious task of writing appropriate small-talk and will therefore put more of their time and resources into developing more interesting stories. Linked below are the two short films as well as the interview I referenced.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/06/an-ai-wrote-this-movie-and-its-strangely-moving/

Do we like robots better when they look like us? Are we more likely to empathize with machines  -real or fictional- if they look or interact like us ? These articles, as well as many others, suggest that the answer is yes. The second article references a study that asked participants to carry out certain activities with a robot and then turn it off. In roughly half of experiments, the robot protested, telling participants it was afraid of the dark and even begging them not to shut it off. The result was that half of these people refused to turn it off and the rest took twice as long to do so. What we can infer from this is that we tend to attribute human feelings and emotions to robots that interact with us socially in ways we are familiar with even when we know that they’re just machines that were programmed to react this way. Our anthropomorphic tenancies are apparent in everything from ancient mythology to how we design robots and portray them in science-fiction, and these tendencies seem to complicate our relationship with robots immensely. They give room for us to empathize with the terminator who is essentially a killing machine and allows movies like “Her” to romanticize a man falling in love -and lust- with a glorified Siri. And while sex toys have always been a taboo subject, they didn’t spark the current sensationalist controversy in popular culture until they were made to look like humans. Despite there being no definitive answer as to why we feel the need to anthropomorphize, it can be attributed to many things including simple human egoism, our need to interpret the outside world through terms that are familiar to us and in terms of our own senses,  or as Kate Devlin states it is simply “the most successful form in nature and that its easier to design a robot to fit our world than to redesign all our tools to fit them”. Whatever the reason behind it is, this need seems to be at the core of many of the ethical controversies regarding the development of robots and our relationships and interactions with them.

Do we like robots better if they look like us? Marco Tempest, 2014

Do we like robots better if they look like us?

New study finds it’s harder to turn off a robot when it’s begging for its life https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/2/17642868/robots-turn-off-beg-not-to-empathy-media-equation

During this TED talk by Paul Josephson – a history professor and self-proclaimed Neo-luddite – he describes three large-scale technologies he believes should be “put out of work” for the benefit of humankind as well as the environment. While i found the topics he chose to address to be somewhat conventional and generally impractical; he presented an interesting notion of what he believes to be at the center of a Neo-luddite mentality. This is that he doesn’t shun technology as a whole and he isn’t even against it taking over many jobs; his conviction is that humans ought to…

“embrace modern technologies that are inherently more democratic that are generally more small-scale that have reversible consequences if there are negative ones and that are likely to encourage more democratic behaviors and institutions; with fewer decisions imposed on us by faceless bureaucrats”

This is to say that he believes that technology isn’t inherently bad but the issues start to arise when it is placed in a context of globalization and mass marketing, and is run by oligopolistic corporations or through governmental intervention and the “police state”. This mentality can be applied to many different scenarios like the clothing industry and implies that the disastrous consequences of fast-fashion wouldn’t have existed if the industry didn’t grow beyond small-scale localized markets and into a massive integrated one. Looking back at the documentary we watched, one could argue that in the mills, the real problems of machines having to keep up with demand and humans having to keep up with machines could’ve been avoided if each mill owner was contented with simply servicing their local communities instead of having to cater for an entire country as well as the growing export market. And since we established during our discussion, that the need for optimal efficiency and maximum production wasn’t a simple supply/demand issue but rather an industrialist’s greed and need for profit; it follows that – through the Neo-luddite’s lens – when useful technologies are abused by people and entities with a disproportionate amount of power and with the goal of profiting at the expense of the average citizen, these technologies become dangerous.