Did you know we’re not supposed to notice the difference between male and female robots? In this month’s Wired magazine, we learn about the pressing question of whether we should assign certain gender traits to certain kinds of robots. Why do we care about this infinitesimal non-issue? Because “what we make of the machine reflects what we are.” Which means, in turn, that “we have the very real opportunity to screw up robots by infusing them with exaggerated, overly simplified gender stereotypes.”
The concern, though, isn’t with the robots, which the writer mercifully acknowledges don’t have genders, but with humans. The problem, we’re told, is that the manufacturers and programmers of robots tend to infuse their productions with “gendered” characteristics—voice, appearance, and so forth—according to the function those robots are supposed to perform. So, for instance, they may assign a scary male voice and broad shoulders to a security robot, or a friendly female voice and slim body to a receptionist robot.
In case you’re not following the logic of our new cisgendered wonderland, the idea is that we should give robots counterintuitive gender traits in the hope that we thereby influence human attitudes to sex roles. If we give the security droid a sweet girlie voice and the receptionist one a big bass-baritone, we’ll . . . be better off.
“It’d be great if somehow we could use robots as a tool to better understand ourselves,” says Julie Carpenter, a consultant who studies robot-human interaction, “and maybe even influence some positive change.” We are admittedly traditionalist on such topics, but it doesn’t sound to us as though the people who care about robots’ gender traits are trying to “better understand” the human species. Change it, maybe. Or confuse it. But understanding is not the goal here.
