Programming Power and the Power of Programming: An Analysis of Racialised and Gendered Sex Robots

Abstract

Human-robot interactions are not foreign to popular culture, and many contemporary works of science-fiction romanticise these interactions by questioning whether or not artificially-intelligent robots have emotions, personalities, and, essentially, autonomy. Similar questions appear in more scholastic works of robot ethics, even in the absence of romanticised fictional narratives. I think these writings ask the wrong questions. I claim that there has not been enough work to examine the potentially violent effects that contemporary models of sexualised, embodied AI may have for the subjects these sex robots represent. Even in academic, socio-scientific analyses of contemporary sex robots that do highlight aspects of rape-culture violence, studies continue to make the mistake of conflating the objecthood of the sex robot with the subjecthood of individuals. Recognising the need for further applied, interdisciplinary, feminist research in this area, I draw primarily from postcolonial theory and deconstructionist gender theory, taking a queered lens to qualitatively analyse the relevant forms of embodied AI (i.e. sex robots) created by 3 central companies. I take a necessarily-intersectional feminist approach to this analysis, influenced by the works of Kimberlé Crenshaw and the Combahee River Collective, in order to recognise the convergences of multiple presentations of societal violence which inform the rape-culture narratives to which, I argue, these robots appeal (1986). I interpret exemplary models of embodied AI in order to analyse the narratives which inform the models’ respective constructions, rather than ascribing my findings to the phenomenon of sexualised robots as a whole, because digital media can always be used in oppositional manners. My examination consists in 3 sections in which I argue that the use and design of these contemporary models of sex robots reify and reproduce the oppressive dynamics which inform their respective constructions.

With special thanks to Dr. Fatima Burney, for her generous advisement, support, and kindness.