The Robotic Imaginary This page intentionally left blank The Robotic Imaginary The Human and the Price of Dehumanized Labor Jennifer Rhee University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis | London Portions of chapter 1 were previously published as “Misidentification’s Promise: The Turing Test in Weizenbaum, Powers, and Short,” Postmodern Culture 20, no. 3 (May 2010); copy- right 2010 The Johns Hopkins University Press. Portions of chapter 3 were previously pub- lished as “Beyond the Uncanny Valley: Masahiro Mori and Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” Configurations 21, no. 3 (Fall 2013): 301– 29; copyright 2013 The Johns Hopkins University Press. Copyright 2018 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401- 2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu The University of Minnesota is an equal- opportunity educator and employer. Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper Names: Rhee, Jennifer, author. Title: The robotic imaginary : the human and the price of dehumanized labor / Jennifer Rhee. Description: Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2018001933 (print) | ISBN 978-1-5179-0297-1 (hc) | ISBN 978-1-5179-0298-8 (pb) Subjects: LCSH: Robots‚ Social aspects. | Robots‚ Moral and ethical aspects. Classification: LCC TJ211.49 .R435 2018 (print) | DDC 303.48/3–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018001933 UMP BmB 2018 Contents Introduction All Too Dehumanized 1 1 Caring: Care Labor, Conversational Artificial Intelligence, 31 and Disembodied Women 2 Thinking: Domestic Labor, Situated Robotics, 67 and Closed Worlds 3 Feeling: Emotional Labor, Sociable Robots, 101 and Shameless Androids 4 Dying: Drone Labor, War, and the Dehumanized 133 Epilogue The Human: That Which We Have Yet to Know 175 Acknowledgments 179 Notes 181 Index 217 This page intentionally left blank Introduction All Too Dehumanized They’re going to kill me next. — EZZALDEEN TUAIMAN, “‘THEY’RE GOING TO KILL ME NEXT’: YEMEN FAMILY FEARS DRONE STRIKES UNDER TRUMP” Ever step on ants and never give it another thought? — MICHAEL HAAS, “LIFE AS A DRONE OPERATOR” Ezzaldeen Tuaiman, who at fourteen years of age survived a drone strike in 2011 that killed his father and older brother, fears for his life. In 2017, drone patrols have increased in frequency over his village, Al-Rawdah. Now, drones hover daily, sometimes three to four times a day, their fre- quency heightening the terror and trauma of drone warfare for Tuaiman and other Yemenis. Meanwhile, former drone operator Michael Haas de- scribes people as “ants” when viewed from a drone, thus gesturing to dehumanization as a primary tool for drone warfare. Haas, who is now an outspoken critic of the United States’ military drone program, describes how, in his work, humans became targets, which became “just black blobs on a screen.” And children like Tuaiman were called “fun- size terrorists,” their deaths described as merely “cutting the grass before it grows too long.”1 This book, which attends to the distance between Tuaiman’s and Haas’s statements about drone warfare, argues that dehumanization, in- cluding the dehumanization that undergirds both the labor of drone op- erators and the United States’ drone program, is embedded in the history of robotics and its various inscriptions and erasures of the human. Concurrently, a steady stream of news stories worries that robots will soon replace human workers.2 Whose jobs will be safe? Whose jobs 1 2 Introduction will be next to be automated out of existence? My book argues that these two phenomena are connected and part of an ongoing story about the ways the robotic imaginary and its inscriptions of “the human” erases and dehumanizes those, mostly the marginalized, who are characterized as “unfamiliar” and “nonnormative.” This book offers an account of this story through an examination of the complicated nexus of labor, dehu- manizing erasures, and an abiding attachment to constructions of “the familiar” across robotics technologies and cultural forms. Considering robotics’ explicit anthropomorphic mission and robotics technologies’ increasing presence in our lives, worlds, and wars, my book asks: How is the human defined in these robotic visions and technological relations? What are the histories of labors, orientations, and motivations that brought this imagined human into being? Whose labors and whose lives are excluded from these considerations of the human? Who is dehuman- ized? Foregrounding the robot’s conceptualization of the human, and more importantly the dehumanized, this book examines robots across technology and cultural forms from the mid- twentieth century to the present. In the chapters that follow, I move through central anthropo- morphic paradigms that organize robots to identify the specific visions of humanness and of the dehumanized they evoke, paying close attention to the gendered and racial dimensions that constitute these visions. Staying with the Human The human, Diana Fuss writes, is “one of our most elastic fictions.”3 And yet this fiction, like many fictions, wields incredible ideological force in the world; how the human is defined has very real, material effects, par- ticularly for those who are excluded from the community of humans and the rights, protections, and privileges accorded therein. Writing in 1996, Fuss elaborates: That the human has a history comes as no surprise to those sub- jects so routinely and so violently excluded from its ideological ter- rain. In the past, the human has functioned as a powerful juridical trope to disenfranchise slaves, immigrants, women, children, and the poor. In America, the human continues to be deployed as a weapon of potent ideological force, its unstable boundaries per- petually challenged and redrawn to exclude entire groups of so- Introduction 3 cially disempowered subjects: the homeless, mothers on welfare, blacks in prison, people with HIV/AIDS, illegal “aliens.” The human is not, and has never been, an all inclusive category.4 The human, as Fuss underscores, is a term with shifting definitions and imaginaries. These definitions and imaginaries wield tremendous ideo- logical force that operates largely through their ability to go uninterro- gated, to pass as inherent, originary, and fixed. My book, which takes seriously the history of the human as one of exclusion and oppression, shares Pheng Cheah’s insistence that “the humanities do not take the humanity of the human being as a given but set as their basic task the inquiry of how humanity is constituted.”5 The Robotic Imaginary rejects the givenness of the human, both as a self-evident concept and as that which is knowable and recognizable in another. Despite my considerable debt to theorizations of the posthuman and the nonhuman, I insist on retaining the human, in all its bagginess, as a central analytic concept. In this book I remain all too attached to “the human,” which encompasses all the historical oppressions and exploita- tions that have been done in its name. Numerous scholars insightfully identify the role of dehumanization, of removing someone from inclu- sion within the privileged and exclusionary category of the human, in producing the concept of the human. Arguing for a more expansive no- tion of the human, Sylvia Wynter and Alexander G. Weheliye examine the historical dehumanization of black people in constructions of the Western human.6 In a special issue of GLQ titled “Queer Inhumanisms” and edited by Mel Y. Chen and Dana Luciano, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson cautions that discourses invested in moving “beyond the human” risk re- instantiating the same exclusions and erasures— the same processes of dehumanization— that continue to constitute the human. What does it mean, Jackson asks, to call for going “beyond the human” when some humans are not included within the category of the human, and when certain notions of the human enable continued racial exclusions?7 José Munoz, in the aforementioned GLQ special issue, turns from the human to the inhuman. Munoz finds promising the inhuman’s appeal to the unknowable, the incommensurable.8 Bringing Munoz’s incom- mensurability of the inhuman into the human itself, I argue for incom- mensurability and unknowability, akin to Éduoard Glissant’s concept of 4 Introduction opacity, as originarily constitutive of the human. Rejecting a Western worldview grounded in the imposition of transparency, Glissant’s claim for opacity as a right embeds unknowability— to oneself and to others— in the human subject. Approaching transparency as constructed rather than ontological, Glissant’s work places the onus not on the individual to make oneself known, but on those discourses and institutions that insist on making- transparent. His category of Relation also significantly changes fundamental assumptions about humanness as a category of sameness. Glissant describes Relation as the sum of all differences. Relation insists on difference, no matter how small, thus refusing the abstracting and ho- mogenizing erasures of the universal. For Glissant, Relation is a site of possibility where the other does not exist as such because there is no grounding