Abstract
Exploring the human(ities) through dehumanizing robotic imaginaries
Robotic imaginaries fascinate, upset, haunt us. Shows like Westworld and movies like Blade Runner or ExMachina suggest a future in which humanoid robots outperform humans, challenging us as superior beings. Upon closer inspection however, one might ask what kind of human conception are such claims built on. And what is the human, anyway? In her book, The Robotic Imaginary. The Human and the Price of Dehumanized Labor Jennifer Rhee, associate professor of English, takes us on a trip across the last seventy years to explore the conception of the human in and through robotic imaginaries (loosely defined as “robotic visions and technological relations” p. 2) as we find them in technology and culture. In doing so, she questions the “givenness” of the human, its knowability and predictability as well as the way robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) equate humans and machines. This is not because she objects to machines or technological relations per se. Her thinking is clearly indebted to “theorizations of the posthuman and the nonhuman” (p. 3). But she is wary of the way anthropomorphism – the attribution of human qualities onto non-human entities – is playing out. While anthropomorphism claims to open up and extend the human, it actually puts forth a very narrow conception of it, dehumanizing those humans who do not fit often based on race or gender. Should we care?
As we are facing rising economic inequality and ecological exhaustion, the human condition is unsettled, triggering explorations of hybrid forms of being that “move beyond the human.” Largely missing from this discourse are questions of exclusion. The movement thus risks to reinscribe “existing hierarchies and their material consequences” (p. 175), and to re-instantiate “those same exclusions and erasures” (p. 3) that have come to define the human in the past. A critical lens is needed if we wish to undo the current status-quo and create new forms of equality and human-robot relations.
At its core, the book demands to abolish political philosophies of libertarianism that privilege “the few over the many,” a logic that is wide-spread among Silicon Valley techno-utopists in favor of anthropomorphism. To make her argument, Rhee draws together three narratives: the technological advancements in robotics and AI and their underlying assumptions; a critical reading of the western capitalist system and its devaluation of certain forms of human (and robotic) labor; and an interpretation of cultural and literary robotic imaginaries that is informed by feminist ethics. Ultimately, Rhee wishes to recuperate the human from dehumanizing ideals such as sameness, recognizability, and productivity. In doing so, she also reclaims the humanities’ critical force to generate imaginations beyond technical or economic imperatives.
The technological narrative maps the developments in robotics and AI from the 1950s onwards: from conversational intelligence (ELIZA, Watson, Siri, Alexa), through situated robotics (Shakey), sociable robots (Kismet), to contemporary war drone technology. Rhee meticulously explores each of them and illustrates how only what is known and familiar to the scientist (or funder – in the U.S. traditionally the defense industry) as being human finds its way into the robotic imaginary. For example, the famous Turing Test for machine intelligence (also referred to as imitation game) rather than objectively drawing the boundary between humans and machines heavily depends on the judge’s (gendered, racialized) expectations of what defines a “human” response. Similarly, Cybernetics’ celebration of cyborgs is developed vis-à-vis the dehumanization of the “enemy other” (e.g. Japanese soldiers), illustrating how “the robotic imaginary in its various forms has always had at its constitutive center gendered devaluation and racial dehumanization” (p. 176). While Rhee’s review is insightful for anyone unfamiliar with robotics and AI technology, it is a (necessary) simplification of the fields’ diversity. A small irony for a book that fights narrow conceptions.
Intertwined with the technological narrative is an economic one in which Rhee discusses care, domestic, emotional, and drone/war labor as typical sites of structural inequalities and increasing automation. She borrows from critical management studies concepts such as racial and emotional capitalism, and emotional and immaterial labor to problematize the devaluation of labor and the conceptual links between robots, labor exploitation, and dehumanization. Those dynamics are questioned in and through literary robotic imaginaries including Karel Capek’s 1920 play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) as the first literary text to inquire the human condition through a robot lens. Richard Power’s novel Galatea 2.2. and Spike Jonze’s film Her are reviewed to challenge how female care labor tends to be dehumanized through its portrayal as something that machines can provide better than humans. Ira Levin’s 1972 novel The Stepford Wives serves to question the devaluation of domestic labor, telling the story of how women are murdered by their husbands and replaced by compliant, robotic doubles. The novel is often cited as feminist critique of how patriarchy reduces aspirational, educated women to mindless robotic housewives. But Rhee does not agree with this interpretation, pointing to how it privileges white, college-educated housewives, while failing to address women of color and white working-class women, undermining female solidary and further devaluing domestic labor. Racial dehumanization and exploitation is also at play in ExMachina where a white femme fatale is able to escape her closed world with the help of an enslaved Asian humanoid. As a modern-day Frankenstein (a classic imaginary that Rhee omits), the film also invites a reflection on the human condition under algorithmic control. Philip K. Dick’s novels We Can Build You and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? on the other hand, reflect on emotional labor and how the power to define what is expected (think of U.S. Homeland security surveillance systems) serves to justify and further stabilize power and privilege, excluding and dehumanizing anyone who does not comply. To readers familiar with (science) fiction, Rhee’s choice might seem unusual as several literary sources are missing (e.g. fiction by Stanislaw Lem or Isaac Asimov). But her aim is not to be exhaustive but to problematize. To achieve this, she admits her choice is deliberate (p. 25).
Rhee’s turn to the humanities also includes a selection of robot art that proves essential for her claims. The art works complement the analytical approach by shifting the focus from cognitive questioning to an embodied knowing and experience of the human as an interdependent, vulnerable, and unpredictable being. Nam June Paik Robot K-456 and the performance piece The First Accident of the 21st Century establish care and interdependence as constitutive for social and technological relations, emphasizing what feminist writers have defined as an “ethics of care” (p. 65). Stelarc’s hybrid works Fractal Flesh and Ping Body entangle the artist’s body with a technological apparatus. Through interactions with the audience, affective experiences of interdependence and shared responsibility for one another’s vulnerability are created, exemplifying Judith Butler’s notion of “common’ corporeal vulnerability” (p. 96). Other installations such as Swarming Emotional Pianos by Erin Gee allow to explore how machines can shape emotions and (collective) aesthetic experiences as part of an ethical inquiry into the ways in which “demands for emotional expression do not police, exclude, or monetize” (p. 131) but instead, can create spaces of coexistence between technology and human emotions beyond normative corporatized and commodified demands of performance and surveillance.
The need for an ethical inquiry is most evident in the chapter on drone technology. To challenge Cybernetics’ robotic imaginary and its continued influence on U.S. drone policies, Rhee wishes to defamiliarize and destabilize the ethnocentric Western Subject position. Teju Cole’s Seven Short Stories about Drones create a perplexing effect of knowing and not-knowing and Omer Fast’s short film 5,000 Feet is the Best defamiliarizes what is seen as familiar, most powerful around the issue of race. They cast the human as “perpetual unknowable and unfamiliar” (p. 29) and put forth the notion of “knowing as not-knowing” (p. 162), contrasting with Cybernetics’ claim to omniscience. The book closes by making an alternative claim, one that echoes Donna Haraway’s notion of objectivity’s partiality by “accounting for positions and knowledges other than one’s own without claiming them or mediating them through one’s own experience” (p. 162). How to conceive of the human? Rhee suggests: “as an unimaginably capacious category that refuses dehumanizing exclusions” (p. 178).
While not a body of new theoretical thought, the book’s cross-disciplinary approach and its commitment to the humanities provides a refreshing take on robots in management and organization studies and offers several contributions to Management Learning and this Special Issue on the Unsettled Humanities.
The book’s primary concern are the consequences of (corporate) anthropomorphism that are born by those who are excluded and dehumanized. As we live in a moment when organizations increasingly apply automated and predictive technologies to manage, control, and surveille the human workforce, the humanizing of machines and transhumanists’ mission to extend the human ironically mark the emergence of new forms of exclusion and dehumanization. Rather than race and gender alone, questions of technological augmentation will come to define who is included and who is excluded. Bringing attention to how anthropomorphism is linked to processes of dehumanization and exclusion, Rhee extends the current debate and offers a critical reading of a dynamic that those who have the privilege of engaging in (by deciding who/what gets humanized), tend not to be aware of. The book’s insistence that we ask of every robotic imaginary who it de/humanizes is an important addition for a reflective management and research praxis that builds on the human ability to question assumptions and engage in self-reflection.
Rhee’s reading of popular culture illustrates what is at stake. For scholars interested in pedagogics, the wide array of robotic imaginaries reviewed in the book can be used as starting point for a reflection of the underlying assumptions and conceptions that shape students’ lived experiences of working conditions and organizational contexts (Bell, 2008). It is a way to practice inclusivity and to translate abstract discussions about the consequences of new forms of organizing, making the consequences of the “unsettling” potentially more “real”. But Westworld, Blade Runner or ExMachina do not foretell the future and Rhee reminds us not to read those films “literally.” We would miss the critique. By de-familiarizing our present, the robotic imaginaries invite the exploration of possible futures. While the (tech) industry tends to fetishize and exploit the technological element of science fiction, claiming its message “for the here and now” (Heffernan, 2019: 12), fiction’s strength is its fictiveness. It does not make any claims to the “truth” but leaves questions about the future and what it means to be human open (Heffernan, 2019: 134). It is this openness that provides the opportunity to experiment with the future and to learn from it. The art works featured in the book support this kind of imagination as they move beyond rational scrutinizing and analytical reasoning. Through the confrontation, we gain an affective, embodied and “felt” understanding of the unsettling, become unsettled ourselves, and develop through personal and collective experiences of vulnerability and interdependence, a sense of the unexplored possibilities that are yet to define human-robot relations.
The humanities are unsettled. But they haven’t lost their ability to unsettle. To move forward, Rhee dares us to break away from asymmetrical patriarchal and enlightened, libertarian, techno-utopist ethics that have dominated the fields of robotics and AI until now. Abandoning ideals such as property and individualism, she advocates a turn to feminist ethics, which holds the potential to transform ethics “into a philosophy of human liberation” (Richardson, 2019: 117) and to create greater economic and political equality in relations that move beyond the human. How to save those ideals from co-optation? Now, as in the future, Rhee concludes, the need for attention to dehumanizing exclusions will “continue to assert itself with urgency” (p. 178). Sorry To Bother You would be my starting point.
