Paper short abstract:

Artificially intelligent robots and machines are often imagined, by their designers to be disabled and impaired. As AI researchers try to recreate partial or complete aspects of the human being (the body, the mind, emotion, vision, manipulation, social awareness), studies of persons with various disabilities and impairments are used as analogous models.

Paper long abstract:

Artificially intelligent robots and machines are often imagined, by their designers to be disabled and impaired. As AI researchers try to recreate partial or complete aspects of the human being (the body, the mind, emotion, vision, manipulation, social awareness), studies of persons with various disabilities and impairments are used as analogous models. The new IBM Watson machine was described by its designers as deaf and blind. In studies of autism, robots are used a means to both reflect on the robots own social incapacities, whilst at the same time imagined as a mediator between socially typically people and children with autism. This paper will examine novel experiments in robots and autism, and illustrate the ways in which disability is used in the making of AI machines.