Helen A'Loy and other tales of female automata: a gendered reading of the narratives of hopes and fears of intelligent m
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Helen A’Loy and other tales of female automata: a gendered reading of the narratives of hopes and fears of intelligent machines and artificial intelligence Rachel Adams1,2 Received: 16 July 2019 / Accepted: 1 October 2019 © Springer-Verlag London Ltd., part of Springer Nature 2019
Abstract The imaginative context in which artificial intelligence (AI) is embedded remains a crucial touchstone from which to understand and critique both the histories and prospective futures of an AI-driven world. A recent article from Cave and Dihal (Nat Mach Intell 1:74–78, 2019) sets out a narrative schema of four hopes and four corresponding fears associated with intelligent machines and AI. This article seeks to respond to the work of Cave and Dihal by presenting a gendered reading of this schema of hopes and fears. I offer a brief genealogy of narratives which feature female automata, before turning to examine how gendered technology today—particularly AI assistants like Siri and Alexa—reproduces the historical narratives associated with intelligent machines in new ways. Through a gendered reading of the hopes and fears associated with AI, two key responses arise. First, that the affective reactions to intelligent machines cannot be readily separated where such machines are gendered female. And second, that the gendering of AI technologies today can be understood as an attempt to reconcile the opposing hopes and fears AI produces, and that this reconciliation is based on the association of such technologies with traditional notions of femininity. Critically, a gendered reading enables us to problematize the narratives associated with AI and expose the power asymmetries that lie within, and the technologies which arise out of, such narratives. Keywords Artificial intelligence · Female automata · Narratives · Apple · Gender · AI assistants
1 Introduction Artificial intelligence (AI) is an idea and practice that cannot be readily divorced from its imaginative context. It is in part for this reason that scholarship aimed at articulating and critiquing the narratives in which ideas and practices of AI are embedded, provide such critical understandings of both the history and imagined future of a world driven by AI. One such work, entitled ‘Hopes and fears for intelligent machines in fiction and reality’, was recently published by Cave and Dihal (2019). The article offers a compelling schema of the hopes and fears associated with intelligent machines, as evident in its wide scope of historical narratives. This schema * Rachel Adams [email protected] 1
Human Sciences Research Council, Cape Town, South Africa
Information Law and Policy Centre, Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, University of London, London, UK
2
is predicated on an arrangement of four hopes (immortality, ease, gratification and dominance) within which four corresponding fears (inhumanity, obsolescence, alienation and uprising) arise. Across this arrangement underlies the aspect of control, such that where there is a loss of human control,
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