The Robotic Imaginary: The Human and the Price of Dehumanized Labor

by Jennifer Rhee

Tracing the connections between human-like robots and AI at the site of dehumanization and exploited labor
The word robot—introduced in Karel Čapek’s 1920 play R.U.R. —derives from rabota, the Czech word for servitude or forced labor. A century later, the play’s dystopian themes of dehumanization and exploited labor are being played out in factories, workplaces, and battlefields. In The Robotic Imaginary , Jennifer Rhee traces the provocative and productive connections of contemporary robots in technology, film, art, and literature. Centered around the twinned processes of anthropomorphization and dehumanization, she analyzes the coevolution of cultural and technological robots and artificial intelligence, arguing that it is through the conceptualization of the human and, more important, the dehumanized that these multiple spheres affect and transform each other. Drawing on the writings of Alan Turing, Sara Ahmed, and Arlie Russell Hochschild; such films and novels as Her and The Stepford Wives ; technologies like Kismet (the pioneering “emotional robot”); and contemporary drone art, this book explores anthropomorphic paradigms in robot design and imagery in ways that often challenge the very grounds on which those paradigms operate in robotics labs and industry. From disembodied, conversational AI and its entanglement with care labor; embodied mobile robots as they intersect with domestic labor; emotional robots impacting affective labor; and armed military drones and artistic responses to drone warfare, The Robotic Imaginary ultimately reveals how the human is made knowable through the design of and discourse on humanoid robots that are, paradoxically, dehumanized. 

Genres: Technology

240 pages, Paperback

Published October 16, 2018

Reviews

[David St John · Rating 5 out of 5]

I often say things like "I love feminism not necessarily to specifically talk about women but for the way it can explode and talk about all sorts of different people" and I think this book is a very good example of that. Very interesting feminist analysis of our cultural robotic imaginary in the West and then an anti-imperialist use of that to examine the dehumanizing processes enabling drone strikes. Rhee hints at a larger definition of the human centering on opacity and unknowability, which is a cool concept I'm personally very behind and want to learn more about.

[Keleigh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jennifer Rhee manages in this volume to produce fascinating literary criticism that is urgently relevant to the political landscape of robotics and our cultural fantasies of robots. I learned a lot from reading it and it’s changed the entire foundation of how I think about robots, AI, and sci-fi. I was very affected by Rhee’s undermining of the obsession with defining what constitutes the “human” by, “seek[ing] to continually expand the human beyond its normative conceptions by insisting on the unknowability and illegibility of the human.”

[Magpie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting take on technology of today. Incorporates feminist ideas and questions gendering of technology.