Abstract
The imaginative context in which artificial intelligence (AI) is embedded remains a crucial touchstone from which to understand and critique both the histories and prospective futures of an AI-driven world. A recent article from Cave and Dihal (Nat Mach Intell 1:74–78, 2019) sets out a narrative schema of four hopes and four corresponding fears associated with intelligent machines and AI. This article seeks to respond to the work of Cave and Dihal by presenting a gendered reading of this schema of hopes and fears. I offer a brief genealogy of narratives which feature female automata, before turning to examine how gendered technology today—particularly AI assistants like Siri and Alexa—reproduces the historical narratives associated with intelligent machines in new ways. Through a gendered reading of the hopes and fears associated with AI, two key responses arise. First, that the affective reactions to intelligent machines cannot be readily separated where such machines are gendered female. And second, that the gendering of AI technologies today can be understood as an attempt to reconcile the opposing hopes and fears AI produces, and that this reconciliation is based on the association of such technologies with traditional notions of femininity. Critically, a gendered reading enables us to problematize the narratives associated with AI and expose the power asymmetries that lie within, and the technologies which arise out of, such narratives.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Bell discusses the Japanese Kaurri and how these were not designed to look human-like, and were therefore gender-less (2018, 28). My own forthcoming work explores African ontologies and epistemologies of artificial intelligence, broadly conceived. Within African accounts of intelligent beings that exist within liminal spaces of the human, is the example of the Igbo ogbanje—a changeling child who transcends through gendered bodies. This theme is discussed in Akwaeke Emezi’s novel Freshwater, 2018. Another example, also from the Nigerian Igbo, is the egwugwu intelligent puppets: majestic human-like constructs, but without a distinct gender as such. The egwugwu feature in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958).
There is a long tradition of associating automata with the uncanny, and both Freudian and Lacanian readings of the uncanny are distinctly gendered. However, it is beyond the scope of this article to fully explore this theme in relation to the affective associations with AI and intelligent machines.
This line is spoken to Nathan by Caleb, who Nathan brings to his research laboratory to conduct a Turing Test with the robot he has created.
On this point see also Adams and Ni Loideain (2019) who note that the very purpose of AI assistants is to free their users up for more important work makes a critical value statement about the kind of work that AI assistants perform which has, as Weinberg (2019) also notes, been historically undertaken by women of colour.
References
Achebe C (1958) Things fall apart. Heinemann, London
Adams R, Ni Loideain N (2019) Addressing indirect discrimination and gender stereotypes in AI virtual personal assistants: the role of international human rights law. Camb Int Law J
Amazon (n.d.) Amazon Echo 2nd Generation. Amazon. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Amazon-Echo-2nd-Generation-Charcoal-Fabric/dp/B06Y5ZW72J. Accessed 5 July 2019
Apple (1984) Newsweek 1984 Macintosh. https://archive.org/stream/Newsweek-1984-Macintosh-brochure/Newsweek%201984%20Macintosh%20brochure_djvu.txt. Accessed 8 July 2019
Apple (n.d.) Siri Homepage. https://www.apple.com/siri/. Accessed 8 July 2019
Bell G (2018) Making life: a brief history of human-robot interaction. Consum Mark Cult 21(1):22–41
Benyamini I (2016) Woman as Man’s uncanny object: a discussion following Freud and Lacan. Undecidable Unconscious: A J Deconstr Psychoanal 3:67–92
Bergen H (2016) I’d blush if I could’: digital assistants, disembodied cyborgs and the problem of gender. Word and Text: A J Lit Stud Linguist 6(1):95–113
Caputi J (1988) Seeing elephants: the myths of phallotechnology. Fem Stud 14(3):487–524
Cave S, Dihal K (2019) Hopes and fears for intelligent machines in fiction and reality. Nat Mach Intell 1:74–78
Cross K (2016) When robots are an instrument of male desire. https://medium.com/theestablishment/when-robots-are-an-instrument-of-male-desire-ad1567575a3d. Accessed 8 July 2019
de l’Isle-Adam AV (2001) L’Ève future (the future eve or tomorrow’s eve). University of Illinois Press, Illinois
Dillon S (forthcoming) The ineradicable Eliza effect and its dangers. Weizenbaum, Pygmalion and the implications of gendering AI
Emezi A (2018) Freshwater. Faber and Faber, London
Emezi A (2019) Pet. Faber and Faber, London
Foucault M (1978) Nietzsche, genealogy, history. In: Bouchard DF (ed) Language, counter-memory, practice: selected essays and interviews. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, pp 139–164
Friedman T (2005) Electric dreams: computers in American culture. NYU Press, New York
Garland A (2015) Ex Machina
Gasché R (2011) The stelliferous fold: toward a virtual law of literature’s self-formation. Fordham University Press, Fordham
Halberstam J (1991) Automating gender: postmodern feminism in the age of the intelligent machine. Fem Stud 17(3):439–460
Hanson Robotics (n.d.) Hanson Robots. https://www.hansonrobotics.com/hanson-robots/. Accessed 10 Oct 2019
Haslanger A (2014) From man–machine to woman–machine: automata, fiction, and femininity in dibdin’s Hannah Hewit and Burney’s Camilla. Mod Philol 111(4):788–817
Hoffman ETA (2016) The sandman. Penguin, New York
Homer (1980) The odyssey. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Huyssen A (1981) The vamp and the machine: technology and sexuality in Fritz Lang’s metropolis. New Ger Crit 24:221–237
Kelin-Rogge R (1927) The creation of an artificial human being. Metrop Mag
Kellett EE (1901) The lady automaton. http://www.forgottenfutures.com/game/ff9/aut.htm. Accessed 8 July 2019
Klass P (1982) “The lady automaton”: a Pygmalion Source? Shaw 2:75–100
Lever E (2018) I was a human Siri. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/smarthome/i-was-a-human-siri-french-virtual-assistant.html. Accessed 8 July 2019
London B (1993) Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, and the spectacle of masculinity. PMLA 108(2):253–267
McCauley L (2007) The frankenstein complex and Asimov’s three laws. Assoc Adv Artif Intell 9–14
McEwan I (2019) Machines like me. Jonathon Cape, London
Mellor AK (1988) Mary Shelley: her life, her fiction, her monsters. Methuen, New York
Nass C, Brave S (2015) Wired for speech. MIT Press, Michigan
Ni Loideain N, Adams R (2019) From Alexa to Siri and the GDPR: the gendering of virtual personal assistants and the role of EU data protection law. Comput Law Soc Rev
Pascale F (2019) This is why AI has a gender problem. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/06/this-is-why-ai-has-a-gender-problem/. Accessed 26 September 2019
Penny L (2016) Why do we give robots female names? Because we don’t want consider their feelings. https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/feminism/2016/04/why-do-we-give-robots-female-names-because-we-dont-want-consider-their. Accessed 8 July 2019
Picker JM (2015) My fair lady automaton. ZAA 63(1):89–100
Pierce D (2017) How apple finally made Siri sound more human. https://www.wired.com/story/how-apple-finally-made-siri-sound-more-human/. Accessed 5 May 2019
Rey LD (1978) Helen A’Loy. In: The best of Lester Del Rey. Ballantine, New York, pp 1–13
Sack H (2019) Metropolis—a cinematic vision of technology and fear. http://scihi.org/metropolis-technology-fear/. Accessed 25 September 2019
Scott LM (1991) “For the rest of Us”: a reader‐oriented interpretation of apple’s “1984” commercial. Pop Cult 25(1):67–81
Shanken EA (2005) Hot to bot: pygmalion’s lust, the Maharal’s fear, and the cyborg future of art. Technoetic Arts A J Specul Res 3(1):43–55
UNESCO and EQUALS Skills Coalition (2019) I'd blush if I could: closing gender divides in ditigal skills through education. EQUALS
Walaszewski Z (2013) Technology as Witchcraft fear and desire: a female robot in Fritz Lang’s metropolis. Kultura Popularna 4(38):102–109
Ward G (2006) Narrative and ethics: the structures of believing and the practices of hope. Lit Theol 20(4):438–461
Weinberg L (2018) Personalization technologies in Her and Feed. Impost 13:78–90
Weinberg L (2019) The Rationalization of Leisure: Marxist Feminism and the Fantasy of Machine Subordination. Lateral 8(1)
Wells HG (1927) Mr Wells reviews a current film. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/1927/04/17/archives/mr-wells-reviews-a-current-film-he-takes-issue-with-this-german.html. Accessed 8 July 2019
Woods HS (2018) Asking more of Siri and Alexa: feminine persona in service of surveillance capitalism. Crit Stud Med Commun 35(4):334–349
Wosk J (1993) The “Electric Eve”: galvanizing women in nineteenth- and twentieth-century art and technology. In: Research in philosophy and technology, volume 13. Technology and Feminism, pp 43–56
Wosk J (2015) My fair ladies: female robots, androids and other artificial eves. Rutgers University Press, Rutgers
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Dr Stephen Cave and Dr Kanta Dihal for their ready encouragement to respond to their work in Nature Machine Intelligence, 2019. In addition, the author thanks Dr Steven Cave and Dr Lindsay Weinberg for their feedback on earlier drafts of this manuscript, as well as the reviewers for their insightful comments.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Adams, R. Helen A'Loy and other tales of female automata: a gendered reading of the narratives of hopes and fears of intelligent machines and artificial intelligence. AI & Soc 35, 569–579 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-019-00918-7
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-019-00918-7