Designing Digital Gender – Making inclusive choices in AI and robotics

Heinrich Böll Stiftung Hong Kong is co-organising two panels related to artificial intelligence in ICAIH 2023 Busan conference.
 

Date: 2 June 2023
Time: 1300-1500 (Korean Standard Time, GMT+9)
Title: Designing Digital Gender – Making inclusive choices in AI and robotics
Venue: Exhibition Center 1 - Room 211, BEXCO, Busan, South Korea

Panel organisers:

• Humanities Research Institute at Chung-Ang University
• Heinrich Böll Stiftung (Hong Kong office and Gunda Werner Institute)
   

Abstract:
Robots are forecasted to take over 20 million manufacturing jobs globally by 2030, and the global service robotics market is projected to be worth USD41.49 billion by 2027. The design, implementation and use of gender features in robots are going to extend gender and power relationships to new heights and forms. For those who are concerned about how to promote equality between different genders, and to make societies more inclusive for females and non-binary genders, societies are now standing at the crossroads. Choices should be carefully made in order to reduce old oppressions and inequalities, instead of proliferating them through new socio-technical systems. The use of artificial intelligence (AI) and robots for intimate and sexual relationships may also have far-reaching social consequences that call for the need of regulation.

Objectives:

1. To critically assess how gender stereotypes are manifested in robots and artificial intelligence (AI), and how such built-in stereotypes influence gender relationships back in societies;
2. To discuss the possible impact of robots and AI on intimate relationships;
3. To explore the possibility of non-binary genders in robots, e.g. LGBTIQ+ robots.

Speakers:

• Adam Poulsen (University of Sydney, Australia)
  • Non-binary gender in robots
• Katharina Klappheck (Gunda Werner Institute, Germany)
  • Gender stereotypes and robots
• Aifric Campbell (Imperial College London, UK)
  • Robots and intimacy

Discussants: MinGi Jang (Kyungnam University), Seong Il Nam (Dongguk University)

Moderator: Lucia Siu, Heinrich Böll Stiftung Hong Kong

Note: By robots, on this panel we refer to “social robots” that have a mechanical body to move and interact with humans under a wide spectrum of applications. Robots may appear as humanoids, animal-shaped, or in geometric forms; we also include sex robots as a specific subset of social robots. We do not include bodiless, software-only virtual environments or distributed systems.

References:
Campbell, Aifric, 2021. The Love Makers, MIT Press.

Devlin, Kate, 2020. Turned on: Science, Sex and Robots. Bloomsbury Publishing.  

European Data Rights (2021). “If AI is the problem, is debiasing the solution?” https://edri.org/our-work/if-ai-is-the-problem-is-debiasing-the-solution/

Ito, Joi (2018). “Why Westerners fear robots and the Japanese do not”, Wired, on Japan’s Shinto culture influencing the perception of robots and AI https://www.wired.com/story/ideas-joi-ito-robot-overlords/

Poulsen, A., Fosch-Villaronga, E. & Søraa, R.A. (2020). “Queering machines”, Nature Machine Intelligence, https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-020-0157-6

Widder, David Gray (2022). “Gender and Robots: A Literature Review”, Carnegie Mellon University, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2206.04716.pdf

Wired 3 Oct 2018. “It’s time to talk about Robot Gender Stereotypes”. https://www.wired.com/story/robot-gender-stereotypes/