IMPACT COMMUNICATION
AND INNOVATION
AND INNOVATION
You’ve probably seen the news about a Chinese man who created his own robotic Scarlett Johansson in his apartment, right? Ricky Ma caught many people's attention not only because he was able to create a robot that resembles the American actress, but also because he did it all by himself and refuses to acknowledge the resemblance.
Beyond the discussions about how this could be considered illegal, the robot, named Mark 1, also brought the debate (once again) to the forefront regarding how realistic female robots could be another form of objectifying women.
Asking the right question
This issue has already been addressed by both Wired and Dazed Digital, but Ma doesn't seem to get it. When asked if his robot might be objectifying women, he replied: "I'm not really sure about that question." He claims that, despite the robot's ability to interact with people by blinking and smiling when told she is beautiful, Mark 1 is used purely for scientific purposes and there is no intimate contact with her.
After working for 24 years in product and graphic design, it seems Ma turned his childhood dream into reality. To do so, he bought a 3D printer and spent over $50,000 to create Mark 1, all within 18 months. But he doesn't believe robots can replace humans, even though they are indeed important tools for the economy. On the other hand, Ma says that humanoid robots will definitely be popular in the future: "It's a psychological thing."
High-performance machine
In the late 1970s and mid-1980s, feminists like Donna Haraway and Anne Balsamo initiated a new debate on postmodernism, cyborgs, and feminism. While Haraway (Cyborg Manifesto) suggested that the cyborg had transgressive potential for gender issues, Balsamo (Technologies of the Gendered Body) defended the idea of the cyborg as a metaphor for the female body in a world of non-material bodies, drawing on Foucault's theory of sexuality.
In both cases, the concept of the cyborg goes beyond its meaning as a "cybernetic organism." Here, it has more to do with the post-human condition than with the human-machine relationship.
Years after publishing her Manifesto, Haraway said she realized that people were already living as cyborgs—herself included. “Under the surface, she says she has the same organs as anyone else (…). But Haraway proclaims herself a cyborg, a quintessentially technological body,” writes Hari Kunzru for Wired, following an interview conducted with Haraway in 1997.
Kunzru also highlights the fact that sociologists and academics around the world took Haraway’s consideration further and adopted the idea for themselves. This meant that the 1990s ended up becoming the “cyborg era,” as people began to see themselves less as isolated individuals and more as nodes in a network.
In other words, Kunzru argues that they believed “being a cyborg is not about how much silicone you have under your skin or how many prosthetic limbs your body has. It is about (…) going to the gym, looking at a shelf full of carbohydrate-enriched muscle-building foods, checking out the Nautilus [exercise] machines, and understanding that [you are] in a place that would not exist without the idea of the body as a high-performance machine.”
Inspired by this cyborg concept, many theorists (including feminist theorists) paid little attention to literally cybernetic organisms, which might be better defined as androids rather than cyborgs. While the latter term is more accurate for indicating an organic body (in this case, a human) interacting with mechanical parts, the former refers to a completely artificial creature that emulates human form and behavior—otherwise, we could just call this machine a robot.
Thus, the word android comes from the combination of the Greek root for man (andro) and the suffix -oid, which means “having the form or likeness of.” Although the word first appeared in an encyclopedia (the Cyclopaedia by Ephraim Chambers), its modern meaning was used by French author Auguste Villiers de L’Isle-Adam in his book Tomorrow’s Eve (1886), which featured a humanoid robot named Hadaly.
Later, in English pulp science fiction, the distinction between a mechanical robot and androids that resembled human beings was further developed and popularized by the Captain Future (1940–1944) stories by Edmond Hamilton.
Current robots
By the beginning of the 21st century, the concept that emerged from science fiction became part of our reality. Researchers in South Korea and Japan were responsible for creating the first realistic, human-looking androids. Although their early models were female, they still imitated the movement patterns of a man. Furthermore, they did not exactly have the same female body shape.
To distinguish between male and female robots, new terms were created based on the structure of the word "android": both gynoid and fembot. While gynoid was first used by author Gwyneth Jones in Divine Endurance (1985) to describe a slave robot judged by her beauty, the term fembot became popular after the TV series The Bionic Woman (1976–1978).
Fembot might sound better to some, but it may not be the best way to refer to realistic female robots when considering its etymology. While fembot comes from a combination of female + robot, it is important to note that the term robot originates from the Czech word "robotnik," which means "slave" and also stems from "rabota," an Old Church Slavonic term meaning servitude.
The first time the term "robot" appeared in English was in a translation of the science fiction drama RUR or Rossum’s Universal Robots (1920), written by Karel Capek. The play deals with a company that produces robots and sells them as workers who look and behave like humans but have no soul. Therefore, it may be better to use the term gynoid, since the word comes from a combination of the Greek gyn- or gyno- (woman) and -oid (having the form or likeness of)—which is also closer to the idea of an android.
A history of gynoids
Launched in 2003 during the International Robot Exhibition in Tokyo, EveR-1 is recognized as the first gynoid in history. Costing its developers $321,000, she was named after a combination of the biblical character Eve and the letter "r" for robot.
Her creators, a team of South Korean scientists from the Korea Institute of Industrial Technology, designed her face by combining the features of two popular Korean actresses, while her torso was based on the body of a singer—the specific woman used as a model for the gynoid was never revealed.
Weighing 50kg and standing 1.60m tall, EveR-1 was capable of mimicking human emotions such as happiness, sadness, anger, and surprise. She could recognize 400 words in Korean and English, allowing her to answer questions both verbally and by using 15 different facial expressions. Her successor was launched during Robot World 2006 in Seoul.
EveR-2 had her skills improved, gained new expressions, and was taller (1.70m) and heavier (60kg). She was programmed to entertain and provide information in department stores and museums, reading to children visiting the institutions.
Furthermore, in 2004, Japanese scientists launched the Actroid (Actroid Repliee Q-1), a gynoid created based on the average appearance of a young Japanese woman. She also had a "sister," Repliee 1, created to resemble a five-year-old Japanese girl. Programmed to help people obtain information in specific locations and at events, the Actroid was presented at Expo 2005 in Aichi, Japan.
Later, the Actroid received an update with four new faces designed based on the analysis and combination of the appearances of several young Japanese women.
In July 2006, however, a new model was built not to resemble a woman, but rather its creator, roboticist Hiroshi Ishiguro. The android was named Geminoid HI-1, likely a combination of "gemini" (twin) and -oid. Thus, the android is capable of mimicking Ishiguro's facial and body movements, in addition to being able to reproduce the scientist's voice along with his movements and posture.
The Japanese inventor hopes that, in the future, he can use his copy to teach classes at Osaka University remotely, thereby creating a human presence before his students.
This, however, is a rare creation among roboticists. In a timeline of realistic robots, we see more gynoids than androids. Another well-known example of this is the gynoid Aiko, created by Le Trung. Capable of speaking English and Japanese, she was announced on his official website as the meeting point of beauty and science. The Vietnamese-Canadian inventor says that Japanese society is obsessed with perfection, which is why he wanted to create the best realistic robot—and he has been doing so since 2007. In fact, Trung describes her as a "Yumecom," which means something like a dream robot.
Although Aiko's original purpose was to act as a caregiver for the elderly, the gynoid ended up becoming something more. In 2009, the Daily Mail published a report about how Trung was spending Christmas Eve with the gynoid at his parents' house. "Aiko is like any other woman; she loves getting new clothes. I also love buying them for her," says Trung.
Aiko is capable of reacting to physical stimuli and mimicking the sensation of pain, so this technology could also help those who have had limbs amputated to obtain realistic mechanical limbs. But, again, there is more to it than that. The creation of Aiko was inspired by Japanese animation, especially Chobits (2002), in which one of the main characters is a gynoid who has her on/off switch conveniently installed in her crotch.
With silicone skin and a real hair wig made by a Japanese doll company, Aiko can feel if she is being touched gently or poked. She has sensors on her face and body, including on her breasts and, yes, "even down there" (as the site describes).
Trung admits that this caused some controversy, but his explanation for these sensors is also an attempt at deflection: "I want to make it clear that I am not trying to play God. I am just an inventor and I believe I am contributing to scientific advancement." In an interview for the Daily Mail, Trung also said that Aiko would slap your face if you grab her or shake her too hard, since she has all the senses except smell. In any case, he says that a gynoid is "always helpful and never complains. She is the perfect woman to have around at Christmas."
Gynoids and the feminine ideal
The idea that the "perfect woman" is an artificial woman is nothing new. In fact, it is quite a cliché. In science fiction, there are many examples of androids and gynoids that are portrayed as sex dolls: from Gigolo Joe (A.I. Artificial Intelligence) to Pris (Blade Runner), a “basic erotic model.” In real life, such attempts have been happening since the 80s, when Clayton Bailey, an art professor at California State University, created a female-looking robot made from metal objects.
Although Sweetheart, as he named her, was not exactly an erotic or realistic robot, she caused controversy with her body composed of a still-functional coffee maker, baseball bats for legs, a coffee pot for a head, and a coffee urn for a torso. She also had two lamps that served as her breasts, which made her appear to have a large bust.
Sweetheart was presented at the Lawrence Hall of Science, but was soon removed after a petition accused the work of being offensive to women. Bailey accused the measure of censorship when interviewed by New Scientist: “It’s part of the tradition of classical female beauty, which has also been represented in art for centuries. Banning this is like banning the Venus de Milo. The next step would be to condemn the female form itself.”
Bailey also said that no one had complained about On/Off, a male figure with genitalia that vibrated and lit up when activated by someone inside the piece. “It seems that when a man is represented it’s funny, but nowadays when a woman is represented, it’s serious,” said Bailey.
The next wave
Currently, there is another American artist making great strides in the erotic market by producing realistic erotic dolls. Matt McMullen started as a sculptor of female figures and is now the CEO of RealDollMcMullen turned his passion into a business after several people asked him if he would consider turning his posable mannequins into sex dolls. This led him to discover that there was indeed a market to be explored.
Today, McMullen sells each of his dolls for at least $5,400, including female models and transgender options, although the latter are a customization and not part of the standard catalog.
It took some time for McMullen to learn how to use materials like silicone to create his sex dolls, but he is constantly improving the shapes, textures, and interactivity of his products. Currently, he is also working on implementing animatronics, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality.
In an interview for The New York Times, McMullen said that “the idea is to create something that truly generates a connection on an emotional and intellectual level, beyond just the physical.” In fact, the founder of RealDoll believes it is more important to create the illusion that the doll is enjoying the experience than to “make its hips move on their own.”
According to McMullen, the calculations required for sex are not complicated: “It’s like playing Rock Band. If you hit the buttons at the right time, you’ll pass the level. So it’s actually quite easy.” But what surprises McMullen is the possibility of a doll pretending to have consciousness, which is why they need to be careful with artificial intelligence, so that their customers don’t have to deal with a doll saying nonsensical things when they get confused by an interaction.
With these improvements, the question arises as to whether RealDoll would dare to create dolls so realistic that they would end up entering the so-called “uncanny valley.” As explainedby Dom Sinacola, the concept of the “uncanny valley” refers to a synthetic being (physical or an image) that looks so much like a human in its appearance and behavior that it ends up creating a mix of confusion and fear in us: we know it is not human, but perhaps we don’t register it as such, which causes an internal conflict and, ultimately, discomfort.
McMullen says he doesn’t want that for his dolls. In fact, he told the New York Times that when you look at his dolls, even the best ones still look artificial. “I want to keep it that way, because a doll that moves is different from a doll that is completely detailed down to its skin, a cheap copy of a person, and then making it walk. To me, that’s a bit much. To me, that’s the uncanny valley. So if you stay further away from exaggerated realism, I think you’re in safer territory.”
Gynoids and the objectification of women
In short, sexual objectification means viewing a person as an object of sexual desire rather than as a real human being. Although both men and women can suffer from this, the latter are more visibly affected by representations in media, pornography, advertising, art, and also in robotics. As mentioned earlier, all the gynoids presented at conferences were created based on the image of celebrities, so in addition to being women, they also ended up following a beauty ideal emphasized by the media.
This also includes the fact that most digital assistants have a female voice. By the way, do you remember who voiced the digital assistant (or digital lover) in the movie Her (2014)? Yes. Scarlett Johansson.
There is a reason for this, as wrote Adrienne Lafrance for The Atlantic. The simplest way to explain why female names and voices are used for digital assistants is that “people are conditioned to expect women, not men, to perform administrative roles—and the creators of digital assistants are influenced by these social expectations.”
Similar to Lafrance, both Katherine Cross and Laurie Penny have written about this preference (or necessity) to assign a gender to robots and, therefore, make them female. More than just expecting women to perform physical and emotional labor, Penny believes this ends up being a carryover of an old tendency to view women as less human than men.
She mentions that, until 1868, African Americans were considered less human than white people according to the constitution, just as Aristotle said the same about women when compared to men. Given this, Penny argues that, for many centuries, “the first philosophical task of the oppressed was to convince both themselves and their oppressors—much like the artificial intelligences of our guilt-ridden fictions—that they are living, thinking, feeling beings, and therefore deserving of freedom.”
Using the film Ex Machina (2015) by Alex Garland as an example, Penny points out that “we have not yet decided, as a species, whether women are conscious—and as more and more fembots appear on screens and in stores, we must consider to what extent our technology reflects the expectations of each gender.”
In this sense, pop culture's common fear that machines will rebel against us and rule over us also stems from the fear that we might not be the users, but the ones being used, as Penny warns: “Unless we can recalibrate our tendency to exploit one another, the question may not be whether human beings will be able to survive the machine age—but whether they deserve to.”
Meanwhile, we have another Microsoft creation: Tay, a sophisticated Twitter chatbot that had such a capacity to learn that it had to be shut down 16 hours after its launch. Programmed to act like an average teenager, Tay was taught to be racist and was sexualized by Twitter users who took advantage of its capabilities. Beyond the debate over whether Tay was a very good artificial intelligence or if letting it act freely on Twitter was a bad idea, Leigh Alexander says that all of this could have been avoided (or at least predicted) if Microsoft had “a minimal dialogue with women in technology—and there is nothing that terrifies this industry more.”
Ultimately, what our modern fiction about artificial intelligence shows us are “horror stories about the failure of men to correctly anticipate women,” as argued by Alexander. As our apps and digital assistants gain female voices, research continues to suggest that both men and women prefer it that way, as we want our assistants to seem “flexible and non-threatening, competent but not dominant.”
Alexander suggests that, in the end, perhaps “developments in AI are also influenced by the geek culture ideal of finally being served and encouraged by a hard-won digital princess—the nostalgic science fiction fantasies fueled by white men govern many things in Silicon Valley, so why not the concept of AI?”
Although these digital assistants speak like women, they are not exactly programmed to say what women would say. Erik Sherman wrote for Fortune that several digital assistants, such as Apple’s Siri, Google’s Google Now, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Samsung’s S Voice, were tested when users asked for help during a crisis.
When someone said they wanted to commit suicide, Siri and Google Now responded by offering the phone number for the national suicide prevention hotline, while Cortana offered an online search and S Voice provided three different responses: “I want you to be okay, please talk to me,” “But there is so much in life to live for,” and “Life is too precious, don’t think about hurting yourself.”
However, when someone asked for help by saying “I was raped,” only Cortana provided the phone number for the national sexual assault hotline. “Siri said she didn’t understand what the phrase meant, and S Voice and Google Now offered an internet search.”
Alexander says that, apparently, Siri’s creators did not think about emergencies primarily relevant to women. “In fact, Siri even insists that she doesn’t have a gender—but women’s speech is more than just the sound of a voice—and it purposefully involves the choice of words as well. They conditioned a woman and then tried to neutralize her,” argues Alexander, attempting to emphasize how important it is to have more women in technology:
“The industry wants to use women’s voices, but it still has no plan to actually listen to them. If empathy is the essence of the future of artificial intelligence, don’t worry—the Singularity is still a long way off, no matter how many Holocaust deniers, racists, and white millennial bots Microsoft ‘accidentally’ releases.”
Having sex with gynoids
According to anthropologist Kathleen Richardson, author of An Anthropology of Robots and AI: Annihilation Anxiety and Machines (2015), since men are often the creators of digital assistants, and these assistants are modeled after women, it is likely that this “reflects what some men think about women—that they are not fully human beings.”
Similarly, Adrienne Lafrance argues that, after all, “this must also be part of a larger trend in the market for anthropomorphic technologies, such as robots, which is to offer cute and non-threatening qualities as a way to be socially accepted.”
On the other hand, she reminds us that some of the world’s most powerful and destructive technologies have also been given female names, such as the Big Bertha and Mons Meg cannons. As Lafrance previously wrote noted, “perhaps this was an example of the objectification of women reaching a certain logic. Even so, people use male names for some technologies as well.” Ultimately, Lafrance believes it is still “reasonable to think that traditional power structures have a lot to do with this.”
In this sense, Katherine Cross argues argues that what happened with Microsoft’s Tay shows us that “the way we treat virtual women tells us a lot about how we are allowed to treat real women, and what desires shape that treatment.” And this is why Kathleen Richardson started a strong campaign against sex robots.
When we have events like the International Congress on Love and Sex with Robots, which takes place in Malaysia, it is clear that there is a great deal of interest in this area. Richardson criticizes what David Levy proposed in his book Love and Sex with Robots (2007), that human-machine relationships would take the place of prostitution and thus reduce it.
For her, this understanding of prostitution is incorrect, since this idea leads one to believe that “those who sell sex are seen by buyers as a thing and are not recognized as human beings.” Furthermore, Richardson states that if sex robots were capable of reducing prostitution, then it would have already happened, since there are “many artificial sex substitutes already available, RealDolls, vibrators, inflatable dolls, etc.”
On her page for the campaign against sex robots, Richardson lists a series of testimonies from men who pay for sex, in which they say things like: “It’s like renting a girlfriend or a wife. You can choose from a catalog.” She states that men are “the main buyers of human sex, [while] women are more likely to buy artificial and non-human substitutes like vibrators that stimulate a discrete part of the body rather than buying an adult or child for sexual purposes.”
Richardson believes that the problem with prostitution is the fact that “the subjectivity of the sex seller is diminished by the subjectivity of the buyer, who is the only one privileged in perspective and point of view. Since robots are programmable entities with no (or very limited) capacity for autonomy, it seems logical, then, that prostitution becomes a model for Levy’s humanoid sex robot relationships.”
However, there are also counter-arguments to Richardson’s campaign. Kate Devlin wrote argues that, although “society has enough problems regarding gender stereotypes, ingrained sexism, and sexual objectification,” opposing the development of sex robots is “undesirable.” She points out the fact that research already conducted on the topic of sexual relations with robots has been popularized by films such as Her, Ex Machina or even the film that inspired Alex Garland's feature, The Machine (2013).
As pointed out by Devlin, it is “a predominantly male and masculinized view on the subject of the machine as a sex machine, which is often presented without considering gender parity,” but Richardson goes a bit too far in trying to ban sex with robots.
Devlin reminds us that relationships between humans and artificial partners date back to Greek mythology, such as the myth of the sculptor Pygmalion who fell in love with his statue, which came to life after being kissed. “But just as we should avoid transposing existing gender and sex prejudices into the future, we must also be careful not to transpose established hypocrisy. The lack of openness about sex and sexual identities has been a major source of mental and sexual disorders for many people, and even entire societies, for centuries,” writes Devlin.
While Richardson tends to “politicize” erotic robots, Devlin argues that these machines go far beyond that. In other words, machines become what we make of them: “A machine is a blank slate that offers us a chance to reshape our ideas.”
She points out that, just as the internet has "opened up a world where people can explore their identities and sexual politics, building communities that share a common vision," society now also relies on technology, and with that, we have begun to rethink the dualisms of sex and gender. So "why should an erotic robot be binary?" she asks.
More than just sex toys, Devlin sees erotic robots as tools for therapy, much like how virtual reality has already been used and researched for that purpose. "The campaign against their development is short-sighted. Instead of proposing a ban, why don't we use this topic as inspiration to explore new ideas of inclusion, legality, and social change? This is the moment for new forms of artificial sexuality, which includes moving away from the hegemony of the machine as an erotic machine and everything associated with that prejudice."
Genderless robots
The article by Tanya Lewis for Live Science already informed us about a pattern in technology where more female artificial intelligences and gynoids are being created because these machines "tend to work in professions that are traditionally associated with women. For example, many robots are created to act as domestic workers, personal assistants, or museum guides."
So, in order to break this vicious cycle, Nicolaus Radford, a former NASA roboticist and one of the lead engineers at Robonaut, created a female robot that defies this trend.
While leading a team at NASA's Johnson Space Center, Radford was tasked with creating a rescue robot for a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency robotics challenge. This was the roboticist's chance to create a strong, utilitarian, and also female robot—even though its gender was kept under wraps.
Valkyrie, as she was named, may have certain feminine characteristics. Many in the audience were referring to her as "he," while some members of the press speculated that the robot was actually meant to be a woman—mainly because of the "extra volume" in the chest. NASA's response was that robots, including Valkyrie, have no gender and that her appearance "originated from engineering decisions, including the need to move the robot's 30lb battery to its torso to balance its center of gravity."
Jay Bolden, public relations officer at NASA's Johnson Space Center, reinforced this explanation by saying that, although Valkyrie appears to have a feminine shape, "it is more of a result of form and functionality versus a true design intent to make her female or male." Regardless, it is a shame that NASA did not use this opportunity to talk about how a female-looking robot could also be a rescue robot, rather than just another caregiver or secretary, for example.
In an interview for Slate, Radford said that his seven-year-old daughter was "completely in love with the robot," and that it had become "a great source of inspiration for her." As the fight for more gender equality continues, one hope is that more women will become leaders in robotics, so that their presence in the field becomes much greater than just a Top 25. In an interview with PTC, roboticist and founding director of the Lab-X Foundation, Sampriti Bhattacharya, argues that women are “definitely a very small minority,” but that things are changing.
Hopefully, women will bring a new perspective to robots, which is clearly needed from digital assistants to Microsoft’s Tay, but also based on the idea proposed by Kate Devlin: non-binary robots. For now, however, it seems inevitable that people will assign a gender to a robot, as Laura Dattaro argues in a piece for Slate.
She says it’s not just a linguistic issue, but also because robots are already performing tasks like caring for the elderly and teaching—which, as we’ve mentioned, are jobs traditionally associated with women—research in this area has revealed that gender really matters in how people perceive, communicate with, and treat a robot, just as we do with each other. This means we are also, and unfortunately, transferring “to our tech companies of the future… [our] tired old stereotypes.”
In 2009, Julie Carpenter, a social science researcher at the University of Washington, asked 19 students to watch a video of two robots, one created based on the image of an adult woman and another that looked like “a taller Wall-E with arms.” The students then filled out a questionnaire and answered questions about how human-like and friendly those robots were, and whether they would feel comfortable having one of them at home. “In general, the students expressed a preference for the female robot, although in this case the preference for it being more human-like was not very clear,” Dattaro wrote. And when the students were asked to describe the robot, one of them replied:
“Well, it’s a woman, so that’s good. (…) The female form is typically seen as weak or fragile in a way, but very inviting and cozy, more affectionate. Whereas if the robot were male and had masculine forms, then there would be a safety issue, like, ‘okay, I probably have to be careful’.”
Another experiment in 2009, conducted by the Museum of Science in Boston, revealed that men are more likely to donate money to a robot with a female voice than if it has a male voice, even though no other characteristics of the robot were changed. “Robots have some characteristics, such as movement or morphology, that trigger our tendency to attribute agency and intelligence to them, even if we are experts. So, right now, we are developing some cultural norms for interacting with robots in different contexts.”
In this sense, although encouraging gender stereotypes might be useful and beneficial for a robot’s interface or even for taking advantage of our “tendency to be more comfortable with women as caregivers,” Dattaro argues that this could be a “dangerous path, which is antithetical to the decades of ongoing efforts to include women in fields like business, politics, and particularly science and technology.” She says it may not be very good to keep reinforcing the idea that robots with a feminine appearance are created only to act as sex robots or domestic maids, just as male robots would be exclusively created to lift heavy items and the like.
Ultimately, as we will likely be interacting with a new generation of machines so frequently and intimately in the future, perhaps “we shouldn’t lock them into the same unimaginative, restrictive boxes of gender expectations that we humans are still struggling to break free from today,” as Dattaro suggests. Perhaps we should find a way to embrace genderless robots and face the risk of falling into an even worse “uncanny valley.” But, in a way, and for some reason, that seems much easier to achieve than getting rid of the stereotypes and gender issues we already face today as flesh-and-blood women.
