Male and female robots

A population of male and female robots evolves in an environment in which to remain alive they must eat the food contained in the environment and to reproduce they must mate with a robot of the opposite sex. The only difference between male and female robots is that after mating males can mate again (reproductively) while females have a fixed period during which they are nonreproductive. The results show that males have a greater variance in reproductive success compared to females and they tend to be always very active looking for the ?scarce resource? constituted by reproductive females and eating any food they are able to find while they are looking for reproductive females. Reproductive females are less active than males and they adopt the reproductive strategy of waiting for males to find and mate with them. On the contrary, nonreproductive females are as active as males but they look for food and are not interested in anything else. We also find a number of differences between males and females in their preferences for different types of food and in offspring care if males do not have parental certainty

How Human Likeness, Gender and Ethnicity affect Elders'Acceptance of Assistive Robots

The present study investigates the extent to which robots' 1) degree of human likeness, 2) gender and 3) ethnicity affect elders' attitude towards using robots as healthcare assistants. To this aim 2 groups of 45 seniors, aged 65 + years, were asked to watch video clips showing three speaking female and male robots, respectively. Each set of stimuli consisted in 2 androids, one with Caucasian and one with Asian aspect, and 1 humanoid robot. After each video clip elders were asked to assess, through the Robot Acceptance Questionnaire (RAQ) their willingness to interact with them, as well as robots' Pragmatic, Hedonic and Attractive qualities. Through this investigation it was found that male seniors were more proactive than female ones in their attitude toward robots showing more willingness to interact with them and attributing more positive scores to robots' qualities. It was also observed that androids were clearly more preferred than humanoid robots no matter their gender. Finally, seniors' preferences were for female android robots with Asian traits and male android with Caucasian traits suggesting that both gender and ethnical features are intermingled in defining robot's appearance that generate seniors' acceptance

Should we campaign against sex robots?

In September 2015 a well-publicised Campaign Against Sex Robots (CASR) was launched. Modelled on the longer-standing Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, the CASR opposes the development of sex robots on the grounds that the technology is being developed with a particular model of female-male relations (the prostitute-john model) in mind, and that this will prove harmful in various ways. In this chapter, we consider carefully the merits of campaigning against such a technology. We make three main arguments. First, we argue that the particular claims advanced by the CASR are unpersuasive, partly due to a lack of clarity about the campaign’s aims and partly due to substantive defects in the main ethical objections put forward by campaign’s founder(s). Second, broadening our inquiry beyond the arguments proferred by the campaign itself, we argue that it would be very difficult to endorse a general campaign against sex robots unless one embraced a highly conservative attitude towards the ethics of sex, which is likely to be unpalatable to those who are active in the campaign. In making this argument we draw upon lessons from the campaign against killer robots. Finally, we conclude by suggesting that although a generalised campaign against sex robots is unwarranted, there are legitimate concerns that one can raise about the development of sex robots

Humanoid and android robots in the imaginary of adolescents, young adults and seniors

This paper investigates effects of participants’ gender and age (adolescents, young adults, and seniors), robots’ gender (male and female robots) and appearance (humanoid vs android) on robots’ acceptance dimensions. The study involved 6 differently aged groups of participants (two adolescents, two young adults and two seniors’ groups, for a total of 240 participants) requested to express their willingness to interact and their perception of robots’ usefulness, pleasantness, appeal, and engagement for two different sets of females (Pepper, Erica, and Sophia) and male (Romeo, Albert, and Yuri) humanoid and android robots. Participants were also requested to express their preferred and attributed age ranges and occupations they entrusted to robots among healthcare, housework, protection and security and front office. Results show that neither the age nor participants and robots’ gender, nor robots’ human likeness univocally affected robots’ acceptance by these differently aged users. Robots’ acceptance appeared to be a nonlinear combination of all these factors

Constructing Womanhood and the Female Cyborg: A Feminist Reading of Ex Machina and Westworld

Female cyborgs have occupied the collective imagination since 1927’s iconic science fiction film Metropolis, reappearing in various popular films and television shows since Metropolis. Some feminist critics argue that depictions of female robots and cyborgs in earlier film and television reinforce sexist norms about female characters in film and television through imagining gendered robots and cyborgs in the form of an “ideal” female body and robots programmed by male scientists for their own purpose; others, however, argue that these same cyborg depictions disrupt traditional binaries of male/female and the biological/technological. How do more recent cinematic and televisual texts’ portrayals of female cyborgs extend or complicate these critiques, especially as the representational strategies of texts such as Ex Machina and Westworld draw from contemporary cultural anxieties about gender, labor, and technology reflected in popular narratives about “the end of men” or the displacements of an increasingly technologized American work force? Attending to the complex ways in which gender, race and sexuality are articulated in these recent fictional texts through a human/robot distinction they both reinscribe and unsettle, and drawing primarily from feminist film studies, cyborg studies, and feminist theory, I argue that Ex Machina’s and HBO’s Westworld’s female cyborgs ultimately re-purpose a trope that conventionally and ostensibly re-entrenches gender and racial norms toward a feminist critique of how U.S. popular culture generally negotiates the perceived promise and peril of new technologies through “old” technologies of race and gender

Robotic crabs reveal that female fiddler crabs are sensitive to changes in male display rate

Males often produce dynamic, repetitive courtship displays that can be demanding to perform and might advertise male quality to females. A key feature of demanding displays is that they can change in intensity: escalating as a male increases his signalling effort, but de-escalating as a signaller becomes fatigued. Here, we investigated whether female fiddler crabs, Uca mjoebergi, are sensitive to changes in male courtship wave rate. We performed playback experiments using robotic male crabs that had the same mean wave rate, but either escalated, de-escalated or remained constant. Females demonstrated a strong preference for escalating robots, but showed mixed responses to robots that de-escalated (‘fast’ to ‘slow’) compared to those that waved at a constant ‘medium’ rate. These findings demonstrate that females can discern changes in male display rate, and prefer males that escalate, but that females are also sensitive to past display rates indicative of prior vigour

Back to the Future of the Body

What can the past tell us about the future(s) of the body? The origins of this collection of papers lie in the work of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities which has been involved in presenting a series of international workshops and conferences on the theme of the cultural life of the body. The rationale for these events was that, in concepts as diverse as the cyborg, the questioning of mind/body dualism, the contemporary image of the suicide bomber and the patenting of human genes, we can identify ways in which the future of the human body is at stake. This volume represents an attempt, not so much to speculate about what might happen, but to develop strategies for bodily empowerment so as to get “back to the future of the body”. The body, it is contended, is not to be thought of as an “object” or a “sign” but as an active participant in the shaping of cultural formations. And this is emphatically not an exercise in digging corpses out of the historical archive. The question is, rather, what can past lived and thought experiences of the body tell us about what the body can be(come)? Dominic Janes edited this book and contributed this chapter