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Melissa Hutsell is an award-winning freelance journalist with a deep rooted passion for both community and international journalism. She was born and raised in Northern California, and has lived, studied, worked, and traveled in more 20 different countries. Melissa holds a Master's degree in Global Journalism from City University London, as well as degrees in Journalism and Globalization from Humboldt State University. Though she covers various topics as both a writer and editor, she specializes in business and cannabis journalism.
Bionic Women: The Gender-ization Of Robots, And The Females Rebooting Them
In this episode of Unladylike, hosts Cristen and Caroline tackle the topic of sexist robots.
Smart devices are found in more than 29 million American homes. They’re set to outnumber humans by 2021. A common theme among them is that they’re human-like, and have gender characteristics that feel “out of fashion,” explain the hosts. So, do robots need a gender re-boot?
Feminized digital assistants are the offspring of WWII technology—voice warnings on airplanes were female because pilots preferred those over male voices. U.S. pilots called them “Bitchin’ Bettys.” Fast-forward to today and devices have taken on more gender characteristics.
Machines learn such characteristics because they are fed them, explains research scientist, Heather Roff.For example, explains one host, if shown reality TV all day, then asked about women’s roles in families, the machine’s answers would be based on the information it received from the shows.
Heather analyzes gender dynamics in her own field of robotics, and autonomous weapons. Who’s building these machines, she asked, and “what kind of knowledge is encoded in them?”
There are two main ways we gender-ize robots. The first is assigning them physical traits (like breasts). The second is through the information – the culture, etc. – we put into robots’ brains.
Take war robots for example. They’ve got broad shoulders, are aggressive and masculine. That’s because the machine was built off the normative ideal of what a solider is. That idea itself holds gender norms.The idea is that machines act – and optimize – based on the data they’re given. If information is biased, the machine will be.
The hosts said “technology isn’t going to be magically more progressive than the society that it is a product of.” To build more thoughtful robots, we need more thoughtful builders. The episode further explores the different types of artificial intelligence, and the females trying to counteract machine-learning bias.
