Human-Machine Communication: Complete Volume 5. Gender and Human-Machine Communication

This is the complete volume of HMC Volume

A sociophonetic analysis of female-sounding virtual assistants

As conversational machines (e.g., Apple\u27s Siri and Amazon\u27s Alexa) are increasingly anthropomorphized by humans and viewed as active interlocutors, it raises questions about the social information indexed by machine voices. This thesis provides a preliminary exploration of the relationship between human sociophonetics, social expectations, and conversational machine voices. An in-depth literature review (a) explores human relationships with and expectations for real and movie robots, (b) discusses the rise of conversational machines, (c) assesses the history of how female human voices have been perceived, and (d) details social-indexical properties associated with F0, vowel formants (F1 and F2), -ING pronunciation, and /s/ center of gravity in human speech. With background context in place, Siri and Alexa\u27s voices were recorded reciting various sentences and passages and analyzed for each of the aforementioned vocal features. Results suggest that sociolinguistic data from studies on human voices could inform hypotheses about how users might characterize conversational machine voices and encourage further consideration of how human and machine sociophonetics might influence each other

Perceptions and Responsiveness to Intimacy with Robots; A User Evaluation

In human-robot interactions research it is significant to question what measures humans will take to contest the challenges and what will become of them. Levy hypothesizes that robots will stimulate human senses with their many capabilities and humans will accept them as intimate companions because the human perception of intimacy will transform to accommodate various nuances. However, the question remains, how much humans understand and accept intimacies with robots. We argue that perceptions of human-robot interactions (HRI) and intimate interactions with robots have a certain impact on how individuals comprehend intimacies with robots. Long term contact with robots, in terms of robotic technology and conversations, will change our views and practices regarding intimacy with robots. Our study revealed that lack of awareness of the potentials of future AI robots has created a fear; fear of losing both tangible, intangible, and the sense of dominance. Yet, our participants’ intimate interactions with robots produced varying degree of responses that, we believe are revealing another scope of human-robot interactions

Gendered Synthetic Love: Real Dolls and the Construction of Intimacy

Real Dolls are life-size, anatomically correct figures. Except for their lifelessness, they are made to look and feel like humans. The availability of Real Dolls allows us to examine the social significance of relationships and gender expectations in a new light. In this paper, we are interested in how the Real Dolls are being offered and accepted as alternative partners. Specifically, we examine the relationship between the commodification of the body and the agency individuals have to create intimacy and connection. We conducted an exploratory content analysis of the customer testimonials on the Real Doll website. Results suggest that the Dolls fit into the stereotypical ideal beauty and promote the commodification of bodies. Buyers use these Dolls not just for sexual gratification but are also used for emotional support. The consequences of these attachments are discussed

On the Matter of Robot Minds

The view that phenomenally conscious robots are on the horizon often rests on a certain philosophical view about consciousness, one we call “nomological behaviorism.” The view entails that, as a matter of nomological necessity, if a robot had exactly the same patterns of dispositions to peripheral behavior as a phenomenally conscious being, then the robot would be phenomenally conscious; indeed it would have all and only the states of phenomenal consciousness that the phenomenally conscious being in question has. We experimentally investigate whether the folk think that certain (hypothetical) robots made of silicon and steel would have the same conscious states as certain familiar biological beings with the same patterns of dispositions to peripheral behavior as the robots. Our findings provide evidence that the folk largely reject the view that silicon-based robots would have the sensations that they, the folk, attribute to the biological beings in question

The Uncanny Valley and the Verisimilitude of Sexual Offenders--Part I: An Ethorobotic Perspective

This Article is the first in a series of three articles in which I explain the cycle of misperception of sexual offenders that has encouraged the unconstitutional application of sexual offender laws, including civil commitment laws, in a false effort to quell public fear, protect children, and reduce sexual victimization. In this first Article of the series, I propose that this cycle of misperception and the resistance to the release of civilly committed sexual offenders may be, in part, the product of a novel phenomenon known as the “uncanny valley” effect

Defectors cannot be detected during"small talk" with strangers.

To account for the widespread human tendency to cooperate in one-shot social dilemmas, some theorists have proposed that cooperators can be reliably detected based on ethological displays that are difficult to fake. Experimental findings have supported the view that cooperators can be distinguished from defectors based on "thin slices" of behavior, but the relevant cues have remained elusive, and the role of the judge's perspective remains unclear. In this study, we followed triadic conversations among unacquainted same-sex college students with unannounced dyadic one-shot prisoner's dilemmas, and asked participants to guess the PD decisions made toward them and among the other two participants. Two other sets of participants guessed the PD decisions after viewing videotape of the conversations, either with foreknowledge (informed), or without foreknowledge (naïve), of the post-conversation PD. Only naïve video viewers approached better-than-chance prediction accuracy, and they were significantly accurate at predicting the PD decisions of only opposite-sexed conversation participants. Four ethological displays recently proposed to cue defection in one-shot social dilemmas (arms crossed, lean back, hand touch, and face touch) failed to predict either actual defection or guesses of defection by any category of observer. Our results cast doubt on the role of "greenbeard" signals in the evolution of human prosociality, although they suggest that eavesdropping may be more informative about others' cooperative propensities than direct interaction

Implied...or implode? The Simpsons' carnivalesque Treehouse of Horror

Since 1990, The Simpsons’ annual “Treehouse of Horror” episodes have constituted a production sub-context within the series, having their own conventions and historical trajectory. These specials incorporate horror plots and devices, as well as general references to science fiction, into the series’ base in situation comedy. The Halloween specials disrupt the series usual family-oriented sitcom structure, dissolving the ideological balances that stabilise that society. By depicting the Family and community in extreme circumstances, in seeing the horror of ‘how things could be’, the Treehouse episode leave us with hanging questions about the nature of social being that bleed into the regular sitcom-style episodes. By breaking from the comparatively realistic social-satire that characterizes the series as a whole, the Halloween specials cast a reflexive gaze back onto “The Simpsons” itself. As a result, the “Treehouse” episodes are valuable as a means of examining the strategies and implications of the series as a whole. Bakhtin’s model of the carnivalesque is utilised to underscore these disruptive traits that characterise the Treehouse episodes