Highly advanced robots are coming -- and
they're more likely to reinforce sexist norms than to change them
by Soraya Chemaly
As technologists frequently remind us, the
singularity,
a time when the realization of smarter-than-human computers irrevocably
alters our future, is nearer every day. Futurists take this prospect
very seriously. They gather to discuss what it means at the annual
Singularity Summit, a meeting hosted by
The Singularity University,
dedicated to exploring the “disruptive implications and opportunities”
of the evolution of artificial technology. But, crucially, most of
those doing the exploring
are men.
We
don’t have to wait for Data-like robots to think about how
discriminatory norms manifest themselves through technology. Google
Instant’s predictive search capability, which saves users 2-5 seconds by making the most likely suggestions “
based on popular queries typed by other users,” is a good illustration. Earlier this year, a
study conducted by Lancaster University concluded that Google
Instant’s autocomplete function
creates an echo chamber for negative stereotypes regarding race,
ethnicity and gender. When you type the words, “Are women…” into Google
it predicts you want one of the following: “…a minority,” “…evil,”
“…allowed in combat,” or, last but not least, “…attracted to money.” A
similar anecdotal exercise by Buzzfeed’s Alanna Okun
concluded that
anyone curious about women would end up with the impression that they
are “crazy, money-grubbing, submissive, unfunny, beautiful, ugly, smart,
stupid, and physically ill-equipped to do most things. And please,
whatever you do, don’t offer them equality.” In effect, algorithms
learn negative stereotypes and then teach them to people who consume and
use the information uncritically.
As with Search, Google’s predictive targeted
advertising algorithms use aggregated user results to make what appear to be sexist assumptions based on gender, for example,
inferring based
on a woman’s search and interests that she was a man because she was
interested in technology and computers. Likewise, Facebook’s
advertising processes can yield strangely prudish results. Earlier this
year, Facebook
declined to run a women’s health care ad featuring a woman holding her breast for a self-examination (no nipple apparent even). Last year, Apple
changed the name of Naomi Wolfe’s book, Vagina to V****a in iTunes. Have yet to find any P***ses.
Results
like these have real effects on our perception of women. In the case of
the Facebook ad it is possible that even the presence of a woman’s
breast (even without a visible areola) raised a red flag for obscenity
in violation of the company’s community guidelines. But Facebook bans
images of women’s nipples on the site – regardless of whether they
appear in
art,
political protest or
breastfeeding.
The effective result, even if it’s not the intent, is the conflation of
all female nudity with pornography and the denial of women’s agency in
defining for themselves how their bodies should be used, perceived and
represented. This is a conservative strike against female freedom of
speech, as an expression of agency.
Agency is an
important concept in
considerations of humanity. One that, in terms of artificial
intelligence, turns out to be highly gendered as well. Elegantly
anthropomorphized robots are on the horizon. Ask almost any scientist
involved in artificial intelligence and they will tell you that in order
to make robotssocially acceptable they need to be human-like. Which
means, most likely, they will have gender. Last year, scientists at
Bielefeld University published a
study in
The Journal of Applied Social Psychology
that might have profound implications. They found that human users
thought of “male” robots as having agency — being able to exercise
control over their environments. On the other hand, female robots were
perceived as having communal personality traits — being more focused on
others than on themselves. Believing that male robotshave agency could
turn into a belief that, when we employ them, they
should have agency and autonomy. “Females,” not so much. In essence, male robot’s
are Misters, female robots are Mrs’ and Misses.
The
Bielefeld University researchers also found that people relied
significantly on hair length to assign a gender to a robot. The longer
the robot’s hair was, the more likely people were to think of it as
female. And once gender was effectively assigned by the participants in
the study, it colored their choices of what therobot should do. “Male”
robots were considered better choices for technical jobs, like repairing
devices and “female” robots were thought to be “better” at
stereotypical household chores.
What do gendered stereotypes in
robots look like? Robotic natural language capabilities and voices
substantively affect human interactions. Consider Siri today. The
latest iPhone release
will give users in the US the option of choosing a male or female
voice. Apple provided no reasons for why prior versions of Siri were
female in the US, but male in the UK. Having voice options may sound
like a step towards gender equality, allowing people to think of
assistants as either male or female. However, there may have been
another reason for making this product choice — namely, while people
are
more likely to likefemale voices, they actually trust male voices more and are more likely to think of them as intelligent and authoritative.
Siri’s
purported sexism was not only a matter of voice selection, but of
content. It seemed as though sexist biases were embedded in the
functionality. Answers were
markedly skewed in favor of meeting the needs of straight, male users. Siri couldn’t answer basic questions about female-centered oral
sex, contraception, and health.
At the 2008 Singularity Summit, Marshal Brain, author of RoboticNation
described the predictable, potentially devastating effects of “second intelligence” competition in the
marketplace.
The service industry will be the first affected. Brain describes a
future McDonald’s staffed by attractive femalerobots who know everything
about him and can meet his every fast food need. In his assessment, an
attractive, compliant, “I’ll get you everything you want before you
even think about it” female automaton is “going to be a good thing.”
However, he went on to talk about job losses in many sectors,
especially the lowest paying, with emphasis on service, construction and
transportation sectors. Brain noted that robotic competition wouldn’t
be good for “construction workers, truck drivers and Joe the plumber.”
Nine out of 10 women are
employed in service industries. The idea that women will be disproportionately displaced as a result of long-standing
sex segregation in the workforce did not factor into his analysis.
I
don’t mean to pick on Brain, but the fact that male human experiences
and expectations and concerns are normative in the tech industry and at
the Singularity Summit is clear. The tech industry is not known for its
profound understanding of gender or for producing products optimized to
meet the needs of women (whom the patriarchy has cast as “second
intelligence” humans). Rather, the industry is an example of a de facto
sex-segregated environment, in which,
according to
sociologist Philip Cohen, “men’s simple assumption that women don’t
really exist as people” is reinforced and replicated. Artificial
intelligence is being developed by people who benefit from socially
dominant norms and little vested personal incentive to challenge them.
The
Bielefeld Researchers concluded that robots could be positively
constructed as “counter-stereotypical machines,” that could usefully
erode rigid ideas of “male” and “female” work. However, the
male-dominated tech sector may have little interest in countering
prevailing ideas about gender, work, intelligence and autonomy. Robotic
anthropomorphism is highly likely to result in robotic
androcentrism.
Singularity
University, whose mission is to challenge experts “to use
transformative, exponential technologies to address humanity’s greatest
challenges,” has twenty-two core faculty on staff, three of whom are
women. The rest, with the exception of maybe on, appear to be white men.
This ratio does not suggest an appreciation of the fact that one of
humanity’s
greatest challenges right now is misogyny.
During
a period of blaring "austerity" when a key goal of those with means is
to cut pensions that have been fairly earned by public employees, it is
astonishing to read that some lobbyists in 40% of US states get paid
pensions from the public trough.
