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Saturday, October 18, 2014

The Reactionary Ideology Bolstered By the False Claim That Robots Inhabit Mars

Mika McKinnon asks, "Is Mars really the only planet solely inhabited by robots?" She then answers, "Yes, but no. The truth behind this meme is an excellent opportunity to investigate just how adventurous our robotic explorers are in visiting all sorts of places we squishy humans haven't."


At the risk of seeming utterly pedantic (in my defense, I'll say McKinnon opened the door by enjoyably geeking out on the proper definition of "planet"), I want to answer that robots don't inhabit any places anywhere. While the verb "inhabit" may seem to designate the neutral occupation of space by anyone or anything, it actually has more the specific connotations of "living" in a place, "residing," "dwelling," "making a home" in a place. To say that robots inhabit Mars is exactly as wrong as declaring that rock formations inhabit Mars together with the robots.

This is not a trivial or an innocent error. To talk about robots as if they are people makes it easier to treat people as if they are robots. Just as the misrecognition of cars, phones, homes, cards as "smart" when they are not undermines the recognition that human beings are smart, a recognition indispensable to our responsibility to the dignity and standing of human beings, so too the investment of the nonliving with the connotations of the living divests the living of the legible terms on which they depend for their lives.

The consequences of this catastrophic framing are actually already beginning to play out in the sentences immediately following the confused initial assertion: robots are described as "adventurous" and as "explorers" who (a devastating implication) are "visiting places." It isn't surprising that when humans finally make an actual appearance in this formulation, humans who really are adventurous, humans who really are explorers, humans who really do visit places, humans who really do inhabit and live places, we are dismissed as "squishy" as compared to superior robot beings who are presumably stronger, sturdier, more resilient.

Of course, what is worse in this rhetorical framing is that human adventurousness and inhabitation of the solar system is in fact expressed precisely in the creation of robotic devices that enable and mediate our explorations. While McKinnon claims that "the truth behind this meme" are the admirable antics of machinic agents, the meme actually foregrounds a falsehood.

The agency displaced onto the robotic figure in these formulations is an active falsification, it is human agency that conceived, funds, builds, programs, operates, narrates, analyses our robotic openings onto our wider worlds of discovery and wonder.

I don't know McKinnon's avowed views and so I would hesitate to ascribe explicit futurological aspirations to her. Near the end of her piece she attributes agency more sensibly saying, "we've done an excellent job of spreading robots throughout the solar system," but before you declare her identification through that pronoun "we" as humanist, I would direct your attention to the prelude to that identification, in which she makes a point of denigrating what she calls human beings' "puny, fleshy bodies" in what seems to me the usual futurological dis-identification. Indeed, in taking up futurological frames (robotic persons, AIs, etc.) that are all too ready-to-hand in public technodevelopmental discourse she is, possibly unwittingly and even anti-wittingly, mobilizing a techno-transcendental ideology which dis-identifies with the living intelligent beings with whom she shares the present world the better to identify instead with artificial living intelligences in "the future" -- an ideology the substance of which (since, mind you, none of these futuristic beings actually ever exist) is the retro-futural rationalization of the terms of incumbent-elite corporate-militarist prevalence over the present emerging onto the next-present.

1 comment:

jimf said...

> To talk about robots as if they are people makes it easier to treat
> people as if they are robots. Just as the misrecognition of cars,
> phones, homes, cards as "smart" when they are not undermines the
> recognition that human beings are smart, a recognition indispensable
> to our responsibility to the dignity and standing of human beings,
> so too the investment of the nonliving with the connotations of the
> living divests the living of the legible terms on which they depend
> for their lives.

Bah! Human beings -- who needs 'em? ;->

Something from today's New York Times:

"To Siri, With Love"
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/19/fashion/how-apples-siri-became-one-autistic-boys-bff.html