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As our new course Introducing Robotics: Robotics and Society gets started, Jess ponders what robots can tell us about humans.
The idea of robots always seems modern doesn’t it? In fact, the concept of the robot (from the Czech robotnik ‘forced worker’) has been around for centuries. It seems as long as we’ve been dreaming and designing, we’ve been dreaming and designing robots.
From Hero of Alexandria’s pneumatic birds to 18th century Japanese puppets to the Furbies of the 1990s, all the way to C3P0, Terminator and ASIMO, as a species we’ve got a garage stuffed full of robotic companions, real and imagined. So, after all these centuries of creating robots what can we learn from them?
Topio, a robot designed to play table tennis against humans. Who knew you needed a six-pack to play table tennis? (Image: Humanrobo)
We like to build things in our own image
And if not in our own image, in the image of things we see around us. Say for instance birds. Or dogs. This is especially true of the fictitious robots we dream up. We endlessly reimagine our world and ourselves.
At one end of the scale are characters like Transformers and Baymax from Big Hero 6, or ASIMO – each vaguely humanoid. More further along and you get get more direct human representations like Doctor Who’s Cybermen and C3P0. Move even further along and you’ll find robots which appear almost human – like replicants, or terminators, or Nadine, or Ana and her kin in Ex Machina, or the ‘synths’ in current UK Channel 4 series ‘Humans’.
A family meets their synth in a spoof ad for Persona Synthetics, the technology company in Channel 4’s Humans (Image: Channel 4)
In fact if you asked someone to draw a robot, you might expect them to draw one with a head, arms and legs, as opposed a floor-cleaning bot.
It seems, despite the many possibilities robotics hold for us, we’ve not quite escaped our own bodies. Maybe this is due to the limits of our brains – i.e. we still communicate through language, so we give our robots voices, or maybe it’s for structural purposes. Maybe it just makes good fiction. Or maybe it’s down to a fascination with things that resemble us: in creating humanoid robots we can properly create controllable, editable versions of ourselves.
It’s difficult to escape our biases
The tricky thing about creating versions of ourselves is that we tend to bring along our baggage – usually in the form of biases. There’s been lots of interesting work investigating gender and race in the tech we’re creating, in reality and in fiction (see Donna Haraway, Amber Case, Sandy Stone and Kevin Warwick).
Some of these theorists hoped technology would mean a new frontier, a playground where we could bend and break old gender and racial stereotypes. But all too often it seems these norms are only affirmed – like how robots designed to serve or sexually gratify are usually gendered female (Ana, Priss, almost all the ‘female’ robots in new HBO series Westworld), whereas tech designed to investigate, or commit violence, is often gendered male (T-800, HAL 9000, Ash from Alien) (for more writing on gender roles and tech see Victoria Turk, Micol Marchetti-Bowick, April Glaser). Although these works of fiction often attempt to inspect and challenge these tropes sometimes they end up participating in them.
Even robots seemingly beyond gender like WALL-E and EVE or R2D2 still can’t quite escape. Much like Microsoft’s misadventure in AI, it seems many of our technological efforts so far only reflect us – and those reflections aren’t always pretty.
Want to learn more about the impact of robotics? Join Introducing Robotics: Robotics and Society today.
The post What can robots tell us about ourselves? appeared first on FutureLearn.
Continue reading...
The idea of robots always seems modern doesn’t it? In fact, the concept of the robot (from the Czech robotnik ‘forced worker’) has been around for centuries. It seems as long as we’ve been dreaming and designing, we’ve been dreaming and designing robots.
From Hero of Alexandria’s pneumatic birds to 18th century Japanese puppets to the Furbies of the 1990s, all the way to C3P0, Terminator and ASIMO, as a species we’ve got a garage stuffed full of robotic companions, real and imagined. So, after all these centuries of creating robots what can we learn from them?
Topio, a robot designed to play table tennis against humans. Who knew you needed a six-pack to play table tennis? (Image: Humanrobo)
We like to build things in our own image
And if not in our own image, in the image of things we see around us. Say for instance birds. Or dogs. This is especially true of the fictitious robots we dream up. We endlessly reimagine our world and ourselves.
At one end of the scale are characters like Transformers and Baymax from Big Hero 6, or ASIMO – each vaguely humanoid. More further along and you get get more direct human representations like Doctor Who’s Cybermen and C3P0. Move even further along and you’ll find robots which appear almost human – like replicants, or terminators, or Nadine, or Ana and her kin in Ex Machina, or the ‘synths’ in current UK Channel 4 series ‘Humans’.
A family meets their synth in a spoof ad for Persona Synthetics, the technology company in Channel 4’s Humans (Image: Channel 4)
In fact if you asked someone to draw a robot, you might expect them to draw one with a head, arms and legs, as opposed a floor-cleaning bot.
It seems, despite the many possibilities robotics hold for us, we’ve not quite escaped our own bodies. Maybe this is due to the limits of our brains – i.e. we still communicate through language, so we give our robots voices, or maybe it’s for structural purposes. Maybe it just makes good fiction. Or maybe it’s down to a fascination with things that resemble us: in creating humanoid robots we can properly create controllable, editable versions of ourselves.
It’s difficult to escape our biases
The tricky thing about creating versions of ourselves is that we tend to bring along our baggage – usually in the form of biases. There’s been lots of interesting work investigating gender and race in the tech we’re creating, in reality and in fiction (see Donna Haraway, Amber Case, Sandy Stone and Kevin Warwick).
Some of these theorists hoped technology would mean a new frontier, a playground where we could bend and break old gender and racial stereotypes. But all too often it seems these norms are only affirmed – like how robots designed to serve or sexually gratify are usually gendered female (Ana, Priss, almost all the ‘female’ robots in new HBO series Westworld), whereas tech designed to investigate, or commit violence, is often gendered male (T-800, HAL 9000, Ash from Alien) (for more writing on gender roles and tech see Victoria Turk, Micol Marchetti-Bowick, April Glaser). Although these works of fiction often attempt to inspect and challenge these tropes sometimes they end up participating in them.
Even robots seemingly beyond gender like WALL-E and EVE or R2D2 still can’t quite escape. Much like Microsoft’s misadventure in AI, it seems many of our technological efforts so far only reflect us – and those reflections aren’t always pretty.
Want to learn more about the impact of robotics? Join Introducing Robotics: Robotics and Society today.
The post What can robots tell us about ourselves? appeared first on FutureLearn.
Continue reading...
