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Paper short abstract:

The industry and practice of 'Artificial Intelligence' and 'robotics' presents a dangerous operationalization of Aristotle's slave ontology - the fiction of woman, man and property merged into one to create a 'living piece of property'. This talk will explore these themes.

Paper long abstract:

The industry and practice of 'Artificial Intelligence' and 'robotics' presents a dangerous operationalization of Aristotle's slave ontology - the fiction of woman, man and property merged into one to create a 'living piece of property'. Aristotle's slave ontology relied on the absolute power of property-owning man, the pornographic uses of women and children, the breaking of human bonds and attachments and a surplus of fiction. This politics is dominant today.

Aristotle's slave ontology is to be found everywhere in the corporate abolition of human attachments through 'artificial intelligence', 'social robots' pornography, digital 'life' and the 'metaverse'. Unfortunately mainstream anthropological responses to it have ushered in different versions of property relations - from cyborgs, to pro porn politics where the subordination of women and children is reproduced on a mass scale, to other fashionable paradigms that dissolve dualisms between humans and property.

In this talk I present the research of my latest book 'sex robots: the end of love' and the findings of nearly 20 years of anthropological research of 'robots' and 'AI'. I present an alternative ontology that informs the politics of love rooted in attachment and the abolition of property relations.