Reading the Human through Robots

Abstract

Debates about whether robots will take over jobs or open up yet-unimagined career possibilities dominate the headlines. Silicon Valley and the techno optimists promise us that robots will automate boring jobs and create new ones, leaving humans free to pursue their interests in the arts and sciences and ushering in a great era of equality, creativity, and freedom. Others warn of robots taking close to half of all human jobs, dramatically increasing unemployment. Those who own the machines and platforms will throw workers into poverty, increasing the already unconscionable gap between rich and poor and further ripping apart the social fabric of democracy. These competing scenarios typically frame questions about the impact of robots on labor in world economic forums and in the media.Jennifer Rhee's The Robotic Imaginary: The Human and the Price of Dehumanized Labor interrupts this debate to ask more basic questions about how robot labor is imagined by research labs, by the artificial intelligence industry, and in film, art, and literature. Bringing this technology into conversation with cultural and literary studies and the humanities, Rhee considers the ways in which it envisions the historical and current understanding of what it means to be human. She does so through chapters organized around caring and care labor, thinking and domestic labor, feeling and emotional labor, and dying and drone labor. Rhee's book is concerned with how the contested terrain of the human is constituted and reconstituted by these new anthropomorphic technologies. This labor imagined in robotic form renders the human knowable, calculable, and recognizable while exposing the dehumanized others existing outside the boundary of what is considered familiar and normal. Each chapter concludes with a short review of robotic art that offers an alternative imagining, a reconfiguring of the human as unknowable, particular, and irreducible.The introduction offers an overview of the origins of robotics, which found its first expression in literature, was developed by scientists, and grew with military funding. The term artificial intelligence (AI) emerged out of the Dartmouth Project, which brought together a small group of men in 1956 to debate the hypothesis that machines could be made to simulate human intelligence. The collapse of the human and the machine—the anthropomorphic metaphor underpinning the field—expands and continues to expand the boundary of the human beyond this initial metaphoric union, Rhee argues, invoking Paul Ricoeur's description of the workings of metaphor. The other critical factor shaping robotics has been DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a branch of the American Department of Defense devoted to technological and military superiority), which has funded most of the research in the field since its creation in 1958.Two of the founding texts in the field, Alan Turing's test for machine intelligence and Masahiro Mori's theory of the uncanny valley, illustrate Rhee's central argument. In the first example, the imitation game begins with a man and a woman who are both trying to convince a judge via a teleprinter that they are female while the judge, who is in a separate room asking questions, tries to correctly identify the woman. Turing then suggests replacing one of the humans with a computer. The game is famously set up to police the boundaries between the human and the machine, but as Rhee points out, the judge needs to conceptualize the human before he or she can possibly assess human likeness. Hence the game also opens up the possibility for the judge to misrecognize the human rendering the very category “human” unstable and open while exposing the biases and normative assumptions at the heart of this policing exercise. In contrast, Mori's theory of the uncanny valley, which sets out to determine the robot design that people would best relate to, enforces narrow normative versions of the human, Rhee observes, that are