An Anthropology of Robots and AI

Author: Kathleen Richardson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317566955
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 149

Book Description
This book explores the making of robots in labs at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). It examines the cultural ideas that go into the making of robots, and the role of fiction in co-constructing the technological practices of the robotic scientists. The book engages with debates in anthropological theorizing regarding the way that robots are reimagined as intelligent, autonomous and social and weaved into lived social realities. Richardson charts the move away from the “worker” robot of the 1920s to the “social” one of the 2000s, as robots are reimagined as companions, friends and therapeutic agents.

An Anthropology of Robots and AI

Author: Kathleen Richardson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317566963
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 148

Challenging Sociality

Author: Kathleen Richardson
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319747541
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 168

Book Description
This book explores the development of humanoid robots for helping children with autism develop social skills based on fieldwork in the UK and the USA. Robotic scientists propose that robots can therapeutically help children with autism because there is a “special” affinity between them and mechanical things. This idea is supported by autism experts that claim those with autism have a preference for things over other persons. Autism is also seen as a gendered condition, with men considered less social and therefore more likely to have the condition. The author explores how these experiments in cultivating social skills in children with autism using robots, while focused on a unique subsection, is the model for a new kind of human-thing relationship for wider society across the capitalist world where machines can take on the role of the “you” in the relational encounter. Moreover, underscoring this is a form of consciousness that arises out of specific forms of attachment styles.

Desire in the Age of Robots and AI

Author: Rebecca Gibson
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030240177
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 141

Book Description
This book examines how science fiction’s portrayal of humanity’s desire for robotic companions influences and reflects changes in our actual desires. It begins by taking the reader on a journey that outlines basic human desires—in short, we are storytellers, and we need the objects of our desire to be able to mirror that aspect of our beings. This not only explains the reasons we seek out differences in our mates, but also why we crave sex and romance with robots. In creating a new species of potential companions, science fiction highlights what we already want and how our desires dictate—and are in return recreated— by what is written. But sex with robots is more than a sci-fi pop-culture phenomenon; it’s a driving force in the latest technological advances in cybernetic science. As such, this book looks at both what we imagine and what we can create in terms of the newest iterations of robotic companionship.

Studying Those Who Study Us

Author: Diana Forsythe
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804742030
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 278

Book Description
Diana E. Forsythe was a leading anthropologist of science, technology, and work who pioneered the field of the anthropology of artificial intelligence. This volume collects her best-known essays, along with other major works that remained unpublished upon her death in 1997. It is also an exemplar of how reflexive ethnography should be done.

Cyborg Futures

Author: Teresa Heffernan
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030218368
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 199

Book Description
This volume brings together academics from evolutionary biology, literary theory, robotics, digital culture, anthropology, sociology, and environmental studies to consider the impact of robotics and AI on society. By bringing these perspectives together in one book, readers gain a sense of the complex scientific, social, and ideological contexts within which AI and robotics research is unfolding, as well as the illusory suppositions and distorted claims being mobilized by the industry in the name of bettering humanity’s future. Discussions about AI and robotics have been shaped by computer science and engineering, steered by corporate and military interests, forged by transhumanist philosophy and libertarian politics, animated by fiction, and hyped by the media. From fiction passing as science to the illusion of AI autonomy to the business of ethics to the automation of war, this collection recognizes the inevitable entanglement of humanity and technology, while exposing the problematic assumptions and myths driving the field in order to better assess its risks and potential.

Posthumanist Learning

Author: Cathrine Hasse
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317298683
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 255

Book Description
In this text Hasse presents a new, inclusive, posthuman learning theory, designed to keep up with the transformations of human learning resulting from new technological experiences, as well as considering the expanding role of cyborg devices and robots in learning. This ground-breaking book draws on research from across psychology, education, and anthropology to present a truly interdisciplinary examination of the relationship between technology, learning and humanity. Posthumanism questions the self-evident status of human beings by exploring how technology is changing what can be categorised as "human". In this book, the author applies a posthumanist lens to traditional learning theory, challenging conventional understanding of what a human learner is, and considering how technological advances are changing how we think about this question. Throughout the book Hasse uses vignettes of her own research and that of other prominent academics to exemplify what technology can tell us about how we learn and how this can be observed in real-life settings. Posthumanist Learning is essential reading for students and researchers of posthumanism and learning theory from a variety of backgrounds, including psychology, education, anthropology, robotics and philosophy.

Robot Theology

Author: Joshua K. Smith
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1666710717
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 154

Book Description
What is the relationship between artificial intelligence, robots, and theology? The connections are much closer than one might think. There is a deep spiritual longing in the world of AI and robotics. Technology is a prayer; it reveals the depth of our eschatology. Through the study of AI and robotic literature one can see a clear desire to both transcend human limitations and overcome the fallenness of human nature. The questions of ethics, power, and responsibility are not new to Christian anthropology. This book will introduce and examine some of the major ethical issues surrounding current AI and robotic technology from a theological and philosophical lens. In the study of AI and robot ethics, the Christian community has a chance to join the global efforts to build technology for good. Will we join them?

Sophia Robot

Author: Thomas Riccio
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781003376835
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
"This book considers David Hanson's robots as a performative expression of our cultural moment serving as a paradigm for the evolution of humanoid social robots. Mechanical beings have occupied the human imagination since antiquity. Now they inhabit the pop-cultural imaginal, embodying the apotheosis of humanity's technological aspirations and dread. Sophia, Hanson's most advanced robot, anticipates the future as she articulates the mythic pattern, narrative, anxieties, and hopes as old as humanity. Gendered as an attractive female with a face inspired by Queen Nefertiti and Audrey Hepburn, Sophia is a cipher, avatar, and turning point that brings humanity and technology a step closer to the emergence of a post human species. The author is a transdisciplinary artist/scholar/educator working internationally in experimental performance, indigenous performance (ritual, shamanism), and social robotics. Hanson's robots and Sophia are examined as performance media and events, as characters evolving as post-human narrative of technological beings. The emergent, complex, and collaborative relationships social robots have with technology, artificial intelligence, performance, anthropology, mythology, psychology, sociology, popular culture, social media, politics, and economics are considered"--

What is Essential to Being Human?

Author: Margaret S. Archer
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000411532
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 311

Book Description
This book asks whether there exists an essence exclusive to human beings despite their continuous enhancement – a nature that can serve to distinguish humans from artificially intelligent robots, now and in the foreseeable future. Considering what might qualify as such an essence, this volume demonstrates that the abstract question of ‘essentialism’ underpins a range of social issues that are too often considered in isolation and usually justify ‘robophobia’, rather than ‘robophilia’, in terms of morality, social relations and legal rights. Any defence of human exceptionalism requires clarity about what property(ies) ground it and an explanation of why these cannot be envisaged as being acquired (eventually) by AI robots. As such, an examination of the conceptual clarity of human essentialism and the role it plays in our thinking about dignity, citizenship, civil rights and moral worth is undertaken in this volume. What is Essential to Being Human? will appeal to scholars of social theory and philosophy with interests in human nature, ethics and artificial intelligence.