As part of our teaching on the Posthumanism module, there were two activities to complete ahead of this week’s lecture on ‘Androids’.
- Watch ‘The Original’ episode/pilot of Westworld (2016)
- Read Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora, “Epilogue: On Technological Desire, Or Why There Is No Such Thing as a Feminist AI”, in Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures (London: Duke University Press, 2019, pp. 188–196)
I read the extract above before I watched the episode of Westworld. The reading really influenced the way I viewed Westworld through a posthumanism lens (and likely reason that our professor set us these tasks). This post is not intended as an academic review of either the article or Westworld but simply a way to quickly gather my thoughts before the lecture. Although the term robots is used in the article, I use the distinction provided by our professor that android is the correct term for a robot that has a humanlike appearance.
Atanasoski and Vora met as postdoctoral scholars who shared an office in the Anthropology Department at Berkeley in 2007. It became evident from their daily interactions that their interests were leading to a collaborative project on race, technology, and politics which led to the publication, in 2019, of their joint work Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures.
From the Westworld Wiki the following summary of the series is useful for the purpose of this post:
The series is a dark odyssey about the dawn of artificial consciousness and the evolution of sin. Set at the intersection of the near future and the re-imagined past, it explores a world in which every human appetite, no matter how noble or depraved, can be indulged.
The Westworld series features lifelike Androids that are programmed with scripts or narratives that they enact as ‘Hosts’ within an immense adventure park for ‘Guests’. The Guests can enjoy an immersive experience while choosing to indulge their boldest or darkest fantasies. This frequently involves the androids (Hosts) being brutally beaten or killed. The androids are also used for sex as passive encounters e.g. a ‘girlfriend experience’ as ‘brothel workers’ or as victims of sexual assault and rape.
The Atanasoski and Vora article discusses various type of ‘lifelike’ sex robots currently being developed and enhanced through advanced robotics, virtual reality and advanced programming of ‘Artificial Intelligence’ (AI). An example of one company creating these androids is Realbotix and their RealDoll product. The creator (an artist and sculptor) of these androids, Matt McMullen, seeks to enhance his ‘silicon sculptures’ with AI to ‘create a genuine bond between man and machine’. Through a simple posthumanism lens there would be much to explore here but the authors introduce a strong postcolonial feminism reading, drawing on the work of black scholar, Hortense Spillers. The authors express clearly the question they are setting out to analyse:
We argue that the design imaginaries behind commercial sex robotics represent a technoliberal update to a racial history entangling the desire for “a carefully calibrated sentience” in an artificial person with a desire for property. Hortense Spillers has asserted that slavery renders the body of the enslaved as flesh, as non-subject. This desire we raise for analysis in this epilogue is for sex with animate objects that resemble human beings in ways that keep them nonautonomous, yet simulate pleasure, and therefore simulate consent. We ask: What stands behind the technoliberal desire to engineer the simulation of reciprocity and pleasure into sex robots, and is it connected to the history of racial slavery and its postslavery aftermath at work within US racial liberalism?
I found it impossible to watch Westworld without having this question forefront in my mind when viewing the ways that Guests enacted violence on Hosts, especially given the time-period and location of Westworld in ‘the old West’. Atanasoski and Vora later draw further on Spiller
The desire for something or someone that has been reduced to pure body, whether as a site of sexual desire or even as a companion, as in the example of Ishiguro’s robots, recollects Hortense Spillers’ observation that the history of US racial slavery permanently marked “various centers of human and social meaning,” specifically through her theorization of the political consequences of the reduction to pure body of the captive African under US racial slavery. The technoliberal desire for the simulation of pleasure and reciprocity in sex robots is a desire for the simulation of consent from a site where subjectivity is structurally made to be impossible
Spillers’ distinguishing of body and flesh is worth briefly expanding upon and here I am citing Vincent Lloyd’s article on Spillers:
Spillers distinguishes between the body, ruled by cultural norms that include prescribed gender markings and performances, and the flesh, the unformed body, not even individuated. Turning African bodies into flesh, making them available to the slave market, involves physical violence. As flesh, the enslaved are not seen as having personalities, are not seen as subjects of ethics. They are interchangeable objects; if they differ it is in height and mass, like any other object — unlike a human. As pieces of flesh, the enslaved are seen as incapable of relationships, incapable of kinship. Taking the baby from the arms of its mother is thinkable if both are mere flesh.
This division of ‘body and flesh’ appears similar to Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s concept of bare life expressed through a distinction he described using the Ancient Greek terms zoē and bios. Bios described the form or manner in which life is lived while zoē is the reductionist biological act of simply being alive or existing. Agamben’s ‘bare life’ refers to when the biological fact of existing is given priority over the way a life is lived. An example of ‘bare life’ for Agamben was seen in the experiences of Auschwitz. I read this as synonymous with Spillers’ description of enslaved Africans reduced to a life of ‘flesh’.
The beating and sexual exploitation of the android Hosts in Westworld appears not to raise ethical concerns in the minds of the Guests as the androids are ‘not human’. The dehumanisation of the subject underpinned the racialised abuse, physical and sexual, of enslaved Africans which is one reason I found watching Westworld unsettling. The ‘human-ness’ or otherwise of androids is a topic that surfaces in Westworld and the in the development of sex robots. McMullen explains in a documentary the authors reference that he wants his SexDoll products to ‘appear clearly as dolls’ to avoid evoking ‘uncanny valley’ syndrome in customers. Uncanny valley describes “a hypothesis which holds that when features look and move almost but not exactly like human beings it causes a response of revulsion among some observers.” A quick Google search validated my understanding that this applies to androids as well as people who have undergone extreme cosmetic surgery.
The uncanny valley is a term used to describe the relationship between the human-like appearance of a robotic object and the emotional response it evokes. In this phenomenon, people feel a sense of unease or even revulsion in response to humanoid robots that are highly realistic. […] Casual observers also tend to describe a vague eeriness when looking at an individual who looks radically different after cosmetic surgery
In The Original episode of Westworld there is a discussion between characters responsible for manufacturing the Hosts relating to a new characteristic that has been programmed to make the androids more lifelike. These ‘reveries’ allow Hosts to draw upon ‘previous experiences’. The enhancement is explained by their creator as introducing “the tiny things that make Hosts so real [and] make the guests fall in love with them”. Later in the episode, this development is questioned with one character complaining “He keeps making them more real, is that really what people want? […] This place works because the guests know the Hosts aren’t real.” In the second episode a guest is confused by the appearance of a woman who welcomes him, asking “are you real?”. The response from the woman is “if you can’t tell, does it matter?”.
Returning to Atanasoski and Vora and the question of whether or not it matters, the authors ask the following question:
Could the drive to develop sex robotics mark a translation and projection of a white supremacist destructive economy of desire into the indefinite and supposedly postrace future dreamed up and avowed by techno-liberalism?
The language used by the characters in Westworld supposes a not-too-distant future where the answer to their question is affirmatively answered. The staff of the park in Westworld joke in episode two about guests “raping and pillaging” and discuss decommissioning a female android because guests are losing interest in having sex with her. The dehumanisation of the androids, no matter that they appear lifelike and exhibit increasing signs of sentience, justifies their use as objects to be assaulted. To make a final concluding point I am going to slightly tweak the words of Spillers to describe the plight of Westworld’s android Hosts.
As machines, the enslaved are not seen as having personalities, are not seen as subjects of ethics. As pieces of machinery, the enslaved are seen as incapable of relationships, incapable of kinship.
While this debate could be contested for anthropomorphising androids, the question is really about the dynamic and power structures that are encoded into the creation and commodification of “sex robots” for example what Shirley MacWilliam has described as ‘Turning Women into Dead Body Objects’. In other words much of the argument is not about the ethics of harming ‘objects’ but the ongoing concern with harm to women.
I uncovered many supporting resources which I will briefly list before the references supporting this post.
Further Reading
- Campaing Against Porn Robots and the work of Kathleen Richardson.
- Man-Made Women: The Sexual Politics of Sex Dolls and Sex Robots by Kathleen Richardson with Charlotta Odlind.
- Extending Legal Protection to Social Robots: The Effects of Anthropomorphism, Empathy, and Violent Behavior Towards Robotic Objects and the work of Kate Darling.
- Turned On: Science, Sex and Robots and the work of Kate Devlin.
- The Future of Sex? | Sex Robots And Us a 2018 BBC 3 Documentary.
- Social and Cultural Studies of Robots and AI a book series.
- Sex Dolls, Robots and Woman Hating: The Case for Resistance by Catlin Roper.
References
- Agamben’s ‘bare life’ and Grossman’s ethics of senseless kindness
- Bare life (Agamben) — Oxford Reference
- “Epilogue: On Technological Desire, Or Why There Is No Such Thing as a Feminist AI”, in Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures (London: Duke University Press, 2019, pp. 188–196)
- Giorgio Agamben Entry on Wikipedia
- Hortense Spillers - Political Theology Network
- The Original -Westworld Wiki
- The Uncanny Lover — The New York Times
