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- Convenors:
-
Sarah Pink
(Monash University)
Emma Quilty (Monash University)
Debora Lanzeni (Monash University)
Kari Dahlgren (Monash University)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Friday 10 June, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel creates an Interdisciplinary Futures focused AI Anthropology, whereby anthropologists might collaborate and shift the narratives in futures-focused spaces where other disciplines currently dominate.
Long Abstract:
The panel calls for papers, films and other media from anthropologists interested in creating a new Interdisciplinary Futures focused AI Anthropology. AI is becoming an inevitable part of life and we need to develop new capacities for anthropologists to work in interdisciplinary futures-focused spaces where other disciplines feel at ease. Our ambition is to develop a high profile publication based on this panel.
We wish to engage in, contest and shift dominant discourses where AI inhabits a future shaped and visioned by techno-solutionist politics and capital flows. Here futures are visioned through existing and anticipated engineering advances in AI capacity, the rise of the consultancies' (Shore & Wright) predictive audits which frame AI as a techno-solution to societal, industry and policy problems, and the short-termist visions of governments complicit in digital capitalism. This context is underpinned by an extractivist approach to ethics, which assumes that if future autonomous, intelligent and connected technologies (eg. such as self-driving cars, digital assistants, robotic workers) are invested with human ethics then people will trust, accept and adopt them, thus enabling predicted futures.
The panel will bring together anthropologists with ambitions to participate theoretically, ethnographically, experimentally and interventionally in interdisciplinary and multistakeholder spaces where futures are envisioned. We are open to different ways of approaching this, but seek to build an engaged and interdisciplinary Futures Anthropology (Pink & Salazar 2017) to undertake anthropology with and in possible futures, to interrogate AI ethics, and which has an ethics of anthropological care and responsibility at its core.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 10 June, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
Illustrates advantages of a transdisciplinary approach when exploring the technical feasibility, social desirability, and the cultural implications of robotic combat troops, self-driving cars, and other AI technology by deconstructing a webcast of two robots debating the future of humanity.
Paper long abstract:
Using as a starting point the high profile 2017 webcast produced by Hansen Robotics, an Artifical Intelligence (AI) industry leader, of their two robots debating the future of humanity, the author uses a transdisciplinary approach to explore the technical feasibility, social desirability, and the cultural, moral, ethical, and political implications of emerging trends in the use of "sentient artificial beings." Building on insights parsed from the 2017 robot debate, the author also examines two controversial but rapidly escalating Artificial Intelligence applications. The first is the recent drive to integrate anthropomorphic "thinking robots" or Lethal Autonomous Weapons (LAWs) into the American military as front-line combat troops that are authorized to use lethality against humans at their own discretion, and the United Nations' subsequent objection to this on both practical and humanitarian ground. The second case study examines the political economy as well as the anthropological implications of the rapidly developing self-driving car industry. The functional fallacy of "machine learning" provides an ethnographic through-line linking these three AI scenarios. The author concludes with a series of concrete suggestions about the role of anthropology in shaping public discourse around rapidly developing AI issues and ways to use ethnography to help educate the policy makers and cultural thought leaders at the intersection of human and robotic societies.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the frictions that emerge as ‘rebellious robots’ participate in everyday sites of care. It generates new design anthropological insights and pathways towards understanding socio-material temporalities of care when designing for automated futures.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines the frictions that emerge as ‘rebellious robots’ participate in everyday sites of care. It generates new design anthropological insights and pathways towards understanding socio-material temporalities of care when designing for automated futures. We illustrate how futures unfold with everyday design adaptations, to reveal the creative and practical potential beyond their sleek innovation expectations. Conceptually we explore how learning about futures retrospectively through existing future ‘prototypes’ we already live with reveals pathways to better understanding potential future technological tensions. Our contribution to the ‘interdisciplinary futures’ invitation of this panel situates and engages with: troubleshooting in AI and Computer Systems; brokenness and repair in STS, design and anthropology; robotic studies in cultural geography; and feminist digital sociology. In developing this we draw from two design ethnographic studies of first-time robotic interactions in rural and regional healthcare contexts in Australia. At a Hospital in Victoria (2018), with Robotic Automated Guided Vehicles (AGV) supporting domestic services of food, linen, and waste; where we trace the routines of trolley #11, identified by research participants as bringing continual frictions and disruptions. At 15 homes in New South Wales (2020) where participants aged 75+ trialled Roomba vacuum cleaners; where we unpack the process of participants becoming familiar with the vacuuming routines, abrupt schedules and Roomba’s unusual paths of movement. These accounts of daily tensions give us a generative entrance to examine broader conceptual and techno-political tensions at the intersection of futures, care ethics and technological innovation paradigms.
Paper short abstract:
This paper depicts my attempt at interventionist audiovisual fieldwork amongst Japanese roboticists in which the collaboration around a video production of the female android ERICA shows her gendered expression to be a problematic standard for robotics AI to gain an embodied algorithmic existence.
Paper long abstract:
This paper tells the story of my failed attempt at interventionist audiovisual fieldwork amongst Japanese roboticists in which I try to produce a video of the female android ERICA, together with her creator, professor Hiroshi Ishiguro. While I fail in convincing professor Ishiguro of ERICA’s contestable, gendered expression, this mismatched collaboration nonetheless exposes the visions of the roboticists’ agenda. The camera becomes a shared framing from which emerges several figure/ground reversals that each draw out different aspects of ERICA as a techno-personified existence. While I focus on the ERICA as a poor representative of the female person, for the Professor, ERICA is first and foremost a research object whose existence depends on how well her algorithmic affordances become calibrated to standardized cultural repertoires. This paper thus discusses how an AI-based being like ERICA comes to figure as a standardized human form calibrated to prescribed gender roles. I discover that the ideal for the roboticists is not to be sensitive towards different groups of people, to nuances of roles and the baggage it carries. Rather, their ideal is to become attuned to an algorithmic existence and to find the proper standards under which an algorithmic being can thrive in an embodied, interactive form. The significance of this, I propose, is that ERICA is indeed an attempted ideal, but not a human one. Her human form rather comes to figure as the ideal platform for the algorithmic scripts of ERICA to become embodied and calibrated towards a future form of socio-technical existence.
Paper short abstract:
Engaging with fields of emerging future technology such as AI and social robots normally dominated by engineers, the paper introduce an interdisciplinary methodology which aim to ensure ethical, conceptual and practical reconfigurations of the research, design, and development of social robotics.
Paper long abstract:
Future technologies such as AI and robots are often described in each end of a continuum between utopian expectations and dystopian fears - either future technologies will save the world’s problems or be the downfall of humanity. Yet, a retrospective look at technological developments shows us that futures will emerge in complex social entanglements and there are multiple potential futures, where humans play an active role in using and appropriating emerging technologies. However, humanities has had very little involvement in Human-Robot Interaction research (HRI), which has generated a research landscape based on quantitative methods unsuitable to trace certain behavioral or phenomenological dynamics of HRI. Humanities researchers need to address questions about how technological developments will affect human social lives and have a responsibility in researching how imaginaries of future technologies shape investments and policies, but also to do speculative research about how technologies and technical practices can affect social lives. Rather than leaving the invention of technology to engineers and wait to research the social impact afterwards, the humanities need to think about not only what technology can do, but also what happens when people appropriate future technology - maybe in other ways than anticipated. The paper discusses how interdisciplinary theoretical and experimental collaborations led us to suggest a mixed-method approach - Integrative Social Robotics - to describe the complexity and dynamics of human experience in interaction with social robots, which in turn led to the development of a new concept for understanding human sensemaking of robots - sociomorphing.