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How to Survive a Robot Invasion: Rights,

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How to Survive a Robot
Invasion

In this short introduction, David J. Gunkel examines the shifting world of

artificial intelligence, mapping it onto everyday twenty-first century life and
probing the consequences of this ever-growing industry and movement.
The book investigates the significance and consequences of the robot
invasion in an effort to map the increasingly complicated social terrain of
the twenty-first century. Whether we recognize it as such or not, we are in
the midst of a robot invasion. What matters most in the face of this machine
incursion is not resistance but how we decide to make sense of and respond
to the social opportunities and challenges that autonomous machines make
available.
How to Survive a Robot Invasion is a fascinating and accessible volume
for students and researchers of new media, philosophy of technology, and
their many related fields. It aims both to assist readers’ efforts to understand
a changing world and to provide readers with the critical insight necessary
for grappling with our science fiction-like future.

David J. Gunkel is an award-winning educator and scholar, specializing in

the philosophy of technology. He is the author of nine books, including The
Machine Question: Critical Perspectives on AI, Robots, and Ethics (2012);
Robot Rights (2018); and An Introduction to Communication and AI (2019).
He currently holds the position of Distinguished Teaching Professor in the
Department of Communication at Northern Illinois University, USA. More
info at http://gunkelweb.com.
How to Survive a Robot
Invasion
Rights, Responsibility, and AI

David J. Gunkel
First published 2020
by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2020 Taylor & Francis
The right of David J. Gunkel to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-1-138-37071-5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-42786-2 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Contents

List of Figures vii

Preface viii

1 Introduction 1
1.1 Robots 1
1.1.1 Science Fiction 2
1.1.2 Science Fact 5
1.2 The Invasion 7
1.2.1 Robots at Work 7
1.2.2 Robots at Home 10
1.3 The Program 11

2 Default Settings 16
2.1 Technological Things 17
2.1.1 The Instrumental Theory of Technology 18
2.1.2 Standard Operating Presumptions 20
2.1.3 Mistakes and Errors 20
2.2 The Right(s) Stuff 23
2.2.1 Substantive Stuff 24
2.2.2 Terminological Troubles 26
2.2.3 Epistemological Exigencies 27
2.2.4 Outcome and Results 29
2.3 Conclusion 30

3 The New Normal 33

3.1 Natural Language Processing 33
3.1.1 The Imitation Game 34
3.1.2 Chatbots 35
vi Contents
3.2 Machine Learning 38
3.2.1 AlphaGo 39
3.2.2 Tay 41
3.2.3 Responsibility Gaps 43
3.3 Social Robots 44
3.3.1 Jibo . . . for Example 44
3.3.2 Social Consequences 47
3.4 Outcomes 49

4 Responses 53
4.1 Slavery 2.0 53
4.1.1 Advantages 54
4.1.2 Disadvantages 57
4.2 Machine Ethics 61
4.2.1 Advantages 64
4.2.2 Disadvantages 65
4.3 Joint Agency 67
4.3.1 Many Hands 68
4.3.2 Advantages and Disadvantages 69
4.4 Conclusion 70

Index 75
Figures

1.1 A scene from the play R.U.R., showing three robots. 2

1.2 Theatrical poster for the film Forbidden Planet (1956) and
featuring the imposing figure of Robby the Robot. 3
1.3 Industrial robot for metal die casting. KUKA Roboter GmbH,
Augsburg, Germany.  8
1.4 The social robot Jibo.  10
2.1 The moral situation.  21
2.2 Artist’s rendition of John Searle’s Chinese Room.  28
3.1 The game of imitation.  35
3.2 AIML code for an ELIZA-type chatbot.  38
3.3 Screenshot of one of the racist tweets posted by Tay.  41
3.4 Jibo and other social robots occupy an ambivalent social
position that is situated somewhere in between “what” are
mere things and those other individuals “who” have
independent status. 45
3.5 US Army iRobot Packbot.  49
4.1 Scanned pages from Mechanix Illustrated, January 1957.  56
4.2 Sophia from Hanson Robotics.  60
4.3 MQ-9 Reaper US military unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV).  62
4.4 Autonomous Waymo Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid minivan
undergoing testing in Los Altos, California. 65
4.5 The spectrum of possible responses to the robot invasion.  71
Preface

This book was not so much written as it was assembled. It has been fabri-
cated by drawing on and remixing material from a number of presentations
and texts that I have given and produced over the past several years.
The basic idea and trajectory for the project was devised and initially
tested in a presentation titled “How to Survive the Robot Apocalypse.” The
talk was first given in September of 2015 during Huskie Hack, the annual
Northern Illinois University (NIU) hackathon. Since that time, versions of it
have been performed at other events and venues. In 2016, it was featured in
NIU STEM Café and Teen STEM Café community-outreach events. It was
delivered during invited talks at the University of Virginia, the University
of Vienna, Pennsylvania State University, and the Universidade Federal do
Piauí in Teresina, Brazil. In 2017, a modified version was presented to the
College Endowment Association in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In 2018, it was
delivered at the Media Ethics Initiative of the Moody College of Communi-
cation at University of Texas, the Faculty Summer Institute at the University
of Illinois, and the Morals and the Machine Workshop at the Edinburgh
Centre for Robotics. And in April of 2019, it was the featured keynote at the
Student Technology, Arts & Research Symposium (STARS) conference at
the University of Illinois, Springfield.
Published transcriptions of the talk have been developed for and have
appeared in several outlets. Although none of these texts have been repro-
duced here in their entirety, they have furnished bits and pieces for the
re-assemblage. These publications include the following: “The Other Ques-
tion: Socialbots and the Question of Ethics,” published in Robert W. Gehl
and Maria Bakardjieva (Eds.), Socialbots and Their Friends: Digital Media
and the Automation of Sociality (New York: Routledge, 2017); “Other
Things: AI, Robots and Society,” published in Zizi Papacharissi (Ed.), A
Networked Self: Human Augmentics, Artificial Intelligence, Sentience (Lon-
don: Routledge, 2018); and “Mind the Gap: Responsible Robotics and the
 Preface ix
Problem of Responsibility,” published in the journal Ethics and Information
Technology, July 2017.
Because of these opportunities to present and test the material with audi-
ences from all over the world, the content that is presented here is as much
a product of my own effort as it is a result of the insightful questions, com-
ments, and feedback I have received from others. Even though it is impossible
to identify and name everyone who has contributed to the mix, I do want to
acknowledge a number of individuals who helped make this work possible:
Maria Bakardjieva (University of Calgary), Janet Brown (College Endow-
ment Association), Mark Coeckelbergh (University of Vienna), Keenan E.
Dungey (University of Illinois, Springfield), Judith Dymond (Northern Illi-
nois University), Robert W. Gehl (University of Utah), J. Michael Herrmann
(University of Edinburgh), Deborah Johnson (University of Virginia), Jef-
frey Nealon (Pennsylvania State University), Zizi Papacharissi (University
of Illinois), Stephanie Richter (Northern Illinois University), Tracy Rog-
ers (Northern Illinois University), Gustavo Said (Universidade Federal do
Piauí), and Scott R. Stroud (University of Texas).
One final note concerning structure and method of access: because the
book is derived from a presentation, which is something that takes place
within a temporal sequence, the text is probably best understood and enjoyed
when read in a linear fashion. I am well aware that this is a “big ask,” espe-
cially for media consumers who are more accustomed to the experience
of random access to short textual bursts posted on social media and other
digital platforms. Although the book can be read in fragments and in any
order you like (which is one of the main advantages of reading a text over
watching a presentation or performance), the material has been designed
to develop and unfold in sequence, like the narrative of a story. This is
one of the reasons why the book is deliberately short and concise. Asking
readers—especially readers whose daily experience with reading involves
accessing digital content on mobile devices—to have the patience to sit
down and read 300+ pages start to finish may simply be too much. But ask-
ing the same for a book that comes in at just 100 pages is less imposing and
more realistic. Whether I have met this challenge and provided something
that is valuable and worth the effort is for you to decide.
1 Introduction

Whether we recognize it or not, we are in the midst of a robot invasion.

The machines are now everywhere and doing virtually everything. We chat
with them online, we play with them in digital games, we collaborate with
them at work, and we rely on their capabilities to manage all aspects of our
increasingly complex digital lives. Consequently, the “robot invasion” is not
something that will transpire as we have imagined it in our science fiction,
with a marauding army of evil-minded androids either descending from the
heavens or rising up in revolt against their human masters. It is an already
occurring event with machines of various configurations and capabilities
coming to take up positions in our world through a slow but steady incur-
sion. It looks less like Blade Runner, Terminator, or Battlestar Galactica
and more like the Fall of Rome.
This book investigates the significance and consequences of this invasion
in an effort 1) to map the increasingly complicated terrain of the twenty-first
century, 2) to assist students, teachers, and researchers in their efforts to
understand and make sense of a changing world, and 3) to provide readers
with the information and critical insight necessary for responding to and
taking an active role in shaping the future.

1.1 Robots
Before we get too far into it, however, it would be a good idea to begin by
getting a handle on the basics . . . beginning with terminology. Despite what
one might think, robots are not the product of scientific R&D. Robots are
originally the result of fiction, specifically a 1920 stage play titled R.U.R.
or Rossum’s Universal Robots and written by the Czech playwright Karel
Čapek (2009). In Czech, as in several other Slavic languages, the word
robota (or some variation thereof) denotes “servitude or labor,” and “robot”
was the word that Čapek used to name a class of manufactured, artificial
slaves that eventually rise up against their human makers (Figure 1.1).
2 Introduction

Figure 1.1 A scene from the play R.U.R., showing three robots.
Source: Public domain image provided by https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Capek_
play.jpg.

But Čapek was not, at least as he tells the story, the originator of this des-
ignation. That honor belongs to the playwright’s brother, the painter Josef
Čapek, who suggested the word to his brother during the time of the play’s
initial development (for more, see Gunkel 2018, 15). Since the publication
of Čapek’s play, robots have infiltrated the space of fiction. But what exactly
constitutes a robot differs and admits of a wide variety of forms, functions,
and configurations.

1.1.1 Science Fiction

Čapek’s robots were artificially produced biological creatures that were
humanlike in both material and form. This configuration persists with the
bioengineered replicants of Blade Runner and Blade Runnner 2049 (the
film adaptations of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?)
and the skin-job Cylons of Ronald Moore’s reimagined Battlestar Galac-
tica. Other fictional robots, like the chrome-plated android in Fritz Lang’s
Metropolis and C-3PO of Star Wars, as well as the “hosts” of HBO’s West-
world and the synths of Channel 4/AMC’s Humans, are humanlike in form
but composed of non-biological materials. Others that are composed of
similar synthetic materials have a particularly imposing profile, like For-
bidden Planet’s Robby the Robot (Figure 1.2), Gort from The Day the Earth
Figure 1.2 T
 heatrical poster for the film Forbidden Planet (1956) and featuring the
imposing figure of Robby the Robot.
Source: Public domain image provided by https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Forbidden
planetposter.jpg.
4 Introduction
Stood Still, or Robot from the television series Lost in Space. Still others
are not humanoid at all but emulate animals or other kinds of objects, like
the trashcan R2-D2, the industrial tank-like Wall-E, or the electric sheep
of Dick’s novella. Finally, there are entities without bodies, like the HAL
9000 computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey or GERTY in Moon, with virtual
bodies, like the Agents in The Matrix, or with entirely different kinds of
embodiment, like swarms of nanobots.
When it comes to defining the term “robot,” science fiction plays a signifi-
cant and influential role. In fact, much of what we know or think we know
about robots comes not from actual encounters with the technology but from
what we see and hear about in fiction. Ask someone—especially someone
who is not an insider—to define “robot,” and chances are the answer that is
provided will make reference to something found in a science fiction film,
television program, or story. This not only applies to or affects outsiders
looking-in. “Science fiction prototyping,” as Brian David Johnson (2011)
calls it, is rather widespread within the disciplines of AI and robotics even if
it is not always explicitly called out and recognized as such. As the roboticists
Bryan Adams et al. (2000, 25) point out: “While scientific research usually
takes credit as the inspiration for science fiction, in the case of AI and robot-
ics, it is possible that fiction led the way for science.” Because of this, science
fiction is recognized as being both a useful tool and a potential liability.
Engineers and developers, for instance, often endeavor to realize what
has been imaginatively prototyped in fiction. Cynthia Breazeal (2010), for
example, credits the robots of Star Wars as the inspiration for her pioneering
efforts in social robotics:

Ever since I was a little girl seeing Star Wars for the first time, I’ve been
fascinated by this idea of personal robots. . . . I knew robots like that
didn’t really exist, but I knew I wanted to build them.

Despite its utility, for many laboring in the field of robotics this incursion
of pop culture and entertainment into the realm of the serious work of sci-
ence and engineering is also a potential problem and something that must
be, if not actively counteracted, then at least carefully controlled and held in
check. As the roboticist Alan Winfield (2011, 32) explains:

Real robotics is a science born out of fiction. For roboticists this is both
a blessing and a curse. It is a blessing because science fiction provides
inspiration, motivation and thought experiments; a curse because most
people’s expectations of robots owe much more to fiction than reality.
 Introduction 5
And because the reality is so prosaic, we roboticists often find ourselves
having to address the question of why robotics has failed to deliver
when it hasn’t, especially since it is being judged against expectations
drawn from fiction.

In whatever form they have appeared, science fiction already—and well

in advance of actual engineering practice—has established expectations for
what a robot is or can be. Even before engineers have sought to develop
working prototypes, writers, artists, and filmmakers have imagined what
robots do or can do, what configurations they might take, and what prob-
lems they could produce for human individuals and communities. John
Jordan (2016, 5) expresses it quite well in his short and very accessible
introductory book Robots:

No technology has ever been so widely described and explored before

its commercial introduction. . . . Thus the technologies of mass media
helped create public conceptions of and expectations for a whole body
of compu-mechanical innovation that had not happened yet: complex,
pervasive attitudes and expectations predated the invention of viable
products.

1.1.2 Science Fact

So what in fact is a robot? Even when one consults knowledgeable experts,
there is little agreement when it comes to defining, characterizing, or even
identifying what is (or what is not) a robot. In the book Robot Futures, Illah
Nourbakhsh (2013, xiv) writes: “Never ask a roboticist what a robot is. The
answer changes too quickly. By the time researchers finish their most recent
debate on what is and what isn’t a robot, the frontier moves on as whole new
interaction technologies are born.”
One widely cited source of a general, operational definition comes from
George Bekey’s Autonomous Robots: From Biological Inspiration to Imple-
mentation and Control: “In this book we define a robot as a machine that
senses, thinks, and acts. Thus, a robot must have sensors, processing ability
that emulates some aspects of cognition, and actuators” (Bekey 2005, 2).
This “sense, think, act” paradigm is, as Bekey (2005, 2) explicitly recognizes,
“very broad,” encompassing a wide range of different kinds of technologies,
artifacts, and devices. But it could be too broad insofar as it may be applied
to all kinds of artifacts that exceed the proper limits of what many consider
to be a robot. “The sense-think-act paradigm,” as John Jordan (2016, 37)
6 Introduction
notes, “proves to be problematic for industrial robots: some observers con-
tend that a robot needs to be able to move; otherwise, the Watson computer
might qualify.” The Nest thermostat provides another complicated case.

The Nest senses: movements, temperature, humidity, and light. It rea-

sons: if there’s no activity, nobody is home to need air conditioning.
It acts: given the right sensor input, it autonomously shuts the furnace
down. Fulfilling as it does the three conditions, is the Nest, therefore,
a robot?
(Jordan 2016, 37)

And what about smartphones? According to Joanna Bryson and Alan Win-
field (2017, 117) these devices could also be considered robots under this
particular characterization:

Robots are artifacts that sense and act in the physical world in real
time. By this definition, a smartphone is a (domestic) robot. It has not
only microphones but also a variety of proprioceptive sensors that let it
know when its orientation is changing or when it is falling.

In order to further refine the definition and delimit with greater precision
what is and what is not a robot, Winfield (2012, 8) offers the following list
of qualifying characteristics:

A robot is:
1. An artificial device that can sense its environment and purpose-
fully act on or in that environment;
2. An embodied artificial intelligence; or
3. A machine that can autonomously carry out useful work.

Although basically another variation of sense-think-act, Winfield adds an

important qualification to his list—“embodiment”—making it clear that a
software bot, an algorithm, or an AI implementation like IBM’s Watson
or DeepMind’s AlphaGo are not robots, strictly speaking. This is by no
means an exhaustive list of all the different ways in which “robot” has been
defined, explained, or characterized. What is clear from this sample, how-
ever, is that the term “robot” is open to a range of diverse and even different
denotations. And these “definitions are,” as Jordan (2016, 4) writes, “unset-
tled, even among those most expert in the field.”
Our task, at this stage, is not to sort this out once and for all but simply
to identify this terminological difficulty and to recognize that what is under
investigation is as much a product of innovation in technology as it is a
 Introduction 7
rhetorical construct. For this reason, words matter. What we call these things
and how they come to be described in both fiction and the scientific litera-
ture are important to how we understand what they are, what they might
become, and what they do and/or are capable of doing. What this means
for us, then, is that our understanding of “robot” and the “robot invasion”
is something of a moving target. We will need to focus attention not just
on different kinds of technological objects but also on the way scientists,
engineers, science fiction writers and filmmakers, journalists, politicians,
critics, and others situate, conceptualize, and explain this technology in and
by language and other methods of representation. What is called “robot” is
not some rigorously defined, singular kind of thing that exists out there in
a vacuum. It is something that is socially negotiated such that word usage
and modes of communication shape expectations for, experiences with, and
understandings of the technology and its impact. Consequently, we need to be
aware of the fact that whatever comes to be called “robot” is always socially
situated and constructed. Its context (or contexts, because they are always
plural) is as important as its technical components and characterizations.

1.2 The Invasion

Despite what is imaginatively foretold in fiction, the robot invasion is not
coming from the future. The robots are already here. Like the “barbarians”
that were said to have invaded Rome, we have already invited the robots
into our places of work, into our homes, and into our lives. They are already
all around us, even if we often do not see or identify them as such.

1.2.1 Robots at Work

Industrial robots (IRs) have slowly but steadily been invading our work
places since the mid-1970s. As S. M. Solaiman (2017, 156) recently reported:

The International Federation for Robotics (IFR) in a 2015 report on

IRs found an increase in the usage of robots by 29% in 2014, which
recorded the highest sales of 229,261 units for a single year (IFR 2015).
IFR estimates that about 1.3 million new IRs will be employed to work
alongside humans in factories worldwide between 2015 and 2018 (IFR
2015). IFR has termed this remarkable increase as ‘conquering the
world’ by robots (IFR 2015). [See Figure 1.3].

But the robots are not just taking over industrial tasks that could be
classed as “dull, dirty and dangerous”—e.g., repetitive and monotonous
tasks performed on manufacturing assembly lines; efforts to extract raw
8 Introduction

Figure 1.3 I ndustrial robot for metal die casting. KUKA Roboter GmbH, Augsburg,
Germany.
Source: Public domain image provided by https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Automation_
of_foundry_with_robot.jpg.

materials from the earth and process industrial waste byproducts; or opera-
tions conducted in situations or environments hazardous to human life, like
terrestrial places flooded with dangerous levels of radiation or toxic chemi-
cals, deep underwater on the floor of the ocean, or in the vacuum of space.
The invasion of the work place is (or will soon be) affecting many other
kinds of occupations. As Martin Ford (2015, xiv) explains in his book Rise
of the Robots:

One widely held belief that is certain to be challenged is the assump-

tion that automation is primarily a threat to workers who have little
education and lower-skill levels. That assumption emerges from the
fact that such jobs tend to be routine and repetitive. Before you get too
comfortable with that idea, however, consider just how fast the frontier
is moving. At one time, a “routine” occupation would probably have
implied standing on an assembly line. The reality today is far different.
While lower-skill occupations will no doubt continue to be affected, a
great many college educated, white collar workers are going to discover
that their jobs, too, are squarely in the sights as software automation and
predictive algorithms advance rapidly in capability.
 Introduction 9
Recent developments in connectionist architecture, machine learning,
and big data mean that we are not just automating the dull, dirty, and dan-
gerous industrial-era jobs. Being automated are tasks and occupations that
fall squarely within the realm of what is often called “routine intellectual
work.” In other words, what is now susceptible to the pressures of automa-
tion are not just the “blue collar” jobs that require repetitive physical activity
but also those middle-wage, “white collar” occupations that are often the
opportunities sought out by university graduates.
Consider, for example, occupations involving activities related to human
communication and information processing. At one time, if you wanted
customers to conduct transactions through a sales or customer service rep-
resentative, you would have needed to hire a good number of human work-
ers to take customer inquiries, to process those requests and communicate
the results, and to supply a friendly (or at least efficient) conversational
interface to the business or enterprise. Today an increasingly significant
portion of this work can be performed by a speech dialogue system (SDS),
like Google Duplex. In fact, Duplex is so good at emulating human-grade
conversational interaction, that governments, like the state of California,
have recently passed legislation stipulating that SDS explicitly inform users
that they are actually talking to a machine and not a “real” human person.
If you wanted something written—catalogue copy, a financial report, or a
magazine article about a championship football match, etc.—a human being
(someone with a job title like “copywriter,” “technical writer,” or “journal-
ist”) was needed to conduct the research, organize and process the appro-
priate data, and generate readable prose. Now, however, Natural Language
Generation (NLG) algorithms, like Narrative Science’s Quill and Auto-
mated Insights’ Wordsmith, can do that work for you. For the time being
at least, these NLG systems seem to be best suited to developing descrip-
tive and factual stories, leaving the more complicated storytelling tasks to
human writers. But for how long? Kris Hammond of Narrative Science has
not only predicted that within ten year’s time 90% of all written content will
be algorithmically generated but has also asserted that an NLG algorithm,
like Quill, might, at some point in the not-too-distant future, successfully
compete for and even win a Pulitzer Prize (Wright 2015, 14).
Similar transformations are occurring in other sectors of the economy.
Right now it is estimated that 4.9 million human workers are employed in
for-hire transportation within the United States—e.g., driving cars (think
limo services, taxis, or Lyft and Uber), long-haul trucking, city and inter-
state buses, local delivery vehicles, etc. (U.S. Department of Transportation
2017, ch. 4). Self-driving vehicles promise or threaten (and the choice of
verb depends on your individual perspective) to take over a good portion of
this work, displacing an entire sector of good paying jobs for skilled workers.
10 Introduction
1.2.2 Robots at Home
The “robot invasion” is not something that is limited to the work place, there
are also “service robots,” which are characterized as machines involved in
“entertaining and taking care of children and elderly people, preparing food
and cooking in restaurants, cleaning residential premise, and milking cows”
(Cookson 2015). There are, according to data provided by the Foundation
for Responsible Robotics, 12 million service robot currently in operation
across the globe, and the IFR predicts “an exponential rise” with the popula-
tion of service robots expected to reach 31 million units by 2018 (Solaiman
2017, 156).
There are also “social robots,” a subset of service robot specifically
designed for human social interaction and use in domestic settings. This
category of robot includes devices and applications like the Paro therapy
robot, which has proven to be an incredibly useful tool for elder care, espe-
cially in situations involving individuals suffering from debilitating forms
of dementia (Wada and Shibata 2007; Šabanović et al. 2013; Bemelmans
et al. 2012), and Jibo, a table-top digital assistant—kind of like Alexa with
a movable body—developed by Cynthia Breazeal and marketed as the “the
world’s first family robot” (Figure 1.4). And at the very far end of the social

Figure 1.4 The social robot Jibo.

Source: Photograph by the author.
 Introduction 11
robotics spectrum, there are various forms of “sex robots,” which are being
promoted not as substitutes for human partners but as a means to augment
human intimacy and sexual relationships (Levy 2007; Danaher and McAr-
thur 2017; Devlin 2018; Richardson 2019). Although providing for different
kinds of social interaction, these social robots are, as Breazeal (2002, 1)
has described it, designed to be “socially intelligent in a human like way,
[so that] interacting with it is like interacting with another person.” Popula-
tion statistics and predictions for social robots exceed IRs, with countries
like South Korea aiming to put a robot in every home by 2020 (Lovgren
2006).
Finally, there are distributed systems like the Internet of Things (IoT),
where numerous connected devices “work together” to make an automated
arrangement that is not “a robot” in the typical sense of the word but a net-
work of interacting and smart devices. The Internet is already overrun, if not
already run, by machines, with better than 50% of all online activity being
machine generated and consumed (Zeifman 2017), and it is now estimated
that IoT will support over 26 billion interactive and connected devices by
2020. By way of comparison, the current human population of planet earth
is estimated to be 7.4 billion (Gartner 2013). We have therefore already
achieved and live in that future Norbert Wiener had predicted at the begin-
ning of his 1950 book, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and
Society:

It is the thesis of this book that society can only be understood through
a study of the messages and the communication facilities which belong
to it; and that in the future development of these messages and com-
munication facilities, messages between man and machines, between
machines and man, and between machine and machine, are destined to
play an ever-increasing part.
(Wiener 1988, 16)

1.3 The Program

What matters most in the face of this already occurring robot incursion is
not resistance—insofar as resistance already appears to be futile—but how
we decide to make sense of and respond to the social opportunities and
challenges that these increasingly autonomous machines make available.
As these various mechanisms take up influential positions in contempo-
rary culture—positions where they are not necessarily just tools or instru-
ments of human action but a kind of interactive social agent in their own
right—we will need to ask ourselves some rather interesting but difficult
questions.
12 Introduction
At what point might a robot, algorithm, or other autonomous system be
held accountable for the decisions it makes or the actions it initiates? When,
if ever, would it make sense to say, “It’s the robot’s fault.” Conversely, when
might a robot, an intelligent artifact, or other socially interactive mechanism
be due some level of social standing or respect? When, in other words,
would it no longer be considered nonsense to inquire about the rights of
robots and to ask the question “Can and should robots have rights?”
We will proceed to address and respond to these questions in three stages
or movements. The next chapter (Chapter 2) begins the investigation by
examining and reevaluating the way we typically deal with and make sense
of our technological devices and systems. It is titled “the default setting,”
because it is concerned with the way that we typically respond to these
opportunities and challenges. Technologies, we assume or tell ourselves, are
invented, manufactured, and utilized by human beings for various applica-
tions and objectives. This is as true of simple devices like hammers and
corkscrews as it is of very sophisticated technological developments like
rocket ships, computers, and artificial intelligence. The German philosopher
Martin Heidegger (1977) famously called this particular characterization of
technology “the instrumental definition” and suggested that it forms what
is considered to be the “correct” understanding of any kind of technologi-
cal contrivance. The second chapter will review and critically assess this
“instrumental theory of technology.”
The third chapter is titled “The New Normal,” and it examines three
recent technological innovations with artificial intelligence and robot-
ics that complicate the instrumental theory and necessitate other ways of
responding to and taking responsibility for robots. The three technologies
include: 1) natural language processing (NLP) applications like Siri, Alexa,
or Google Home. These devices are designed to interact with users in a
conversational manner, and they now populate many of the social spaces in
which we live, work, and play. Unlike artificial general intelligence (AGI),
which would presumably occupy a subject position reasonably close to that
of another human person, these ostensibly mindless but very social things
complicate social relationships by opening onto and leaving undecided
questions regarding who or what is talking to us. 2) Machine learning (ML)
applications. The instrumental theory, for all its success handling different
kinds of technology, appears to be unable to contend with recent devel-
opments in machine learning, where machine actions are not prescribed
by human developers through program instructions but are developed by
the machine through discovering patterns in large data sets. Consequently,
machine learning systems are deliberately designed to do things that their
human programmers cannot anticipate, completely control, or answer for.
In other words, we now have autonomous (or at least semi-autonomous)
 Introduction 13
robotic systems that in one way or another have “a mind of their own.” And
this is where things get interesting, especially when it comes to questions
of responsibility and social standing. 3) Social robots. Unlike industrial
robots, which are designed to accomplish a specific task on the assembly
line, social robots are meant to interact with human users in a human-like
way. For this reason, social robots are deliberately designed for and occupy
a strange position in the social order. They are not just another instrument,
like a refrigerator or a toaster, but they also are not quite another “person.”
They are a kind of quasi-other that is intentionally designed to occupy an
ambivalent position that complicates existing categories.
The fourth and final chapter considers and critically assesses the range of
possible responses to these new social challenges. What we see in the face
or the faceplate of the robot is a situation where our theory of technology—a
theory that has considerable history behind it and that has been determined
to be as applicable to simple hand tools as it is to complex technological
systems—seems to be unable to respond to or answer for recent develop-
ments with artificial intelligence, algorithms, and robots. In the face of these
opportunities/challenges there are at least three possible responses: Slavery
2.0, Machine Ethics, and Joint Agency. The final chapter will introduce and
perform a cost/benefit analysis of these three modes of response. The goal
in doing so is not to select one as better than the others but to lay out the
options that we—each of us individually and together as a community—
need to consider and debate. The goal, therefore, is not to provide readers
with the “right answer” but to articulate the terms of the debate, map out
what needs to be addressed and decided, and provide individuals with the
knowledge and data to make and defend their own determinations.
One final word concerning the size of this book. As you can see in both
the number of chapters and the physical dimensions, the book is short. This
is deliberate and strategic. It is not, I should emphasize, a product of there
being little to say on the matter. There is, in fact, plenty to say, and I will
highlight various resources that may be accessed should you want additional
information. The brevity is more a matter of wanting to provide readers with
a quick and easily accessible mode of entry into what is often considered to
be too complicated, too involved, and too technical for non-specialists. The
challenges that are now confronted, with innovations in robots, machine
learning algorithms, and autonomous technology, are simply too important
and influential for us to leave decision-making to a few experts. We do, no
doubt, need the experts. But we also need an informed and knowledgeable
public who can think and act confidently in the face of new technological
opportunities and challenges. The book is designed to bring everyone (irre-
spective of background or formal training) up to speed in an effort to ensure
that we (together) are working to respond to and take responsibility for OUR
14 Introduction
future. It is only by working together and across difference that we have the
chance to survive a robot invasion.

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