Special Issue: Tools to Generate or to Solve Crises? Perspectives on Robots and Artificial Intelligence
Research Articles
Stefan Poser
Introduction: Tools to Generate or to Solve Crises? Perspectives on Robots and Artificial Intelligence, pp. 9-14
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When Karel Čapek’s science fiction play R.U.R. Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti coined the expression “robot” in 1920, the field of robotics was created. It was immediately, and irreversibly, shaped by the idea of anthropomorphic robots and their popular representations in magazines and science fiction. As research into human-robot interactions has shown, those types of robots and their implied humanity still shape our views and expectations of robots today. […]
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Dustin A. Abnet
Americanizing The Robot: Popular Culture, Race, and the Rise of a Global Consumer Icon, 1920–60, pp. 15-35
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Analyzing both popular and consumer culture, this paper shows how the robot became Americanized in popular culture during the middle of the twentieth century. After the term “robot” emerged in 1921 with the premiere of Karel Čapek’s 1921 play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), it immediately became tied to a larger debate over both Fordism and the Americanization of the global economy. While both sides of the Atlantic understood the play’s critiques of Fordism, Europeans initially understood the robot as a fundamentally American character while Americans understood it primarily in terms of social class. In the late 1920s and 1930s, however, the Westinghouse Electric Company claimed the robot as an American slave through a process of corporatization and racialization. By the start of the Cold War, American popular culture had largely embraced the robot as a key factor in the pursuit of a global consumer empire that continued into the twenty-first century.
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Stefan Poser
A Complicated Love Story? Human Robot Interaction in Popular Culture: A Case Study on Technology-Linked Emotions , pp. 36-52
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Popular representations of anthropomorphic robots and their descriptions as something similar to humans shaped the image of robots and AI to an astonishing degree. Emotions play an important role in this process. This article is dedicated to popular representations of robots and emotions, linked to them. Its focus is on a widely distributed 1960s youth book on robots, written by the Viennese author Karl Bruckner. Based on analysing the emotions linked to Bruckner’s robots and the robots’ way of acting, it will become clear that the author both made use of an existing popular image of robots and contributed to the development of this image. This article argues that the popular image of anthropomorphic robots hinders the adoption of robots for occupational purposes: the advantages and dangers of employing robots are overwhelmed by our emotional response to humanoid robots as beings, which are similar to us.
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Jennifer Robertson
Technologies of Kokoro. Imagineering Human-Robot Co-Existence, Perspectives from Japan, pp. 53-80
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Some Japanese roboticists building humanoids today seek to imbue their robots with kokoro (heartmind, mindful heart, emotion). Others focus on building humanoids that convey kokoro when interacting with humans. In conjunction with robotic kokoro, the scholarly and popular media alike have announced the advent in Japan of “robot priests,” two of which include SoftBank’s humanoid robot Pepper, that debuted in 2015, and Mindar, an android bodhisattva commissioned in 2019 by a temple in Kyoto. This article discusss (and demystifies) both Pepper’s “emotion recognition engine,” and Mindar’s interactive capabilities and clarifies the declaration by pioneering roboticist Mori Masahiro that robots have the “Buddha-nature” within them. The article critically investigates how religious technologies and affective human-robot relations are imagineered theoretically and in practice.
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Nicolas Lange and Frank Dittmann
Toys, Drones, and Humanoids: The New Robotics Exhibition at the Deutsches Museum, Munich, pp. 81-96
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Today robots seem to be everywhere. While we have so far known them primarily from Hollywood movies, video games, science fiction novels, or industrial production halls, robots are taking over a growing number of everyday chores. These service robots are no longer separated from humans, but are located directly in our private environment. This not only awakens expectations, but also stirs up fears. From mid-2022, the new permanent exhibition on robotics at the Deutsches Museum (Munich, Germany) has offered an opportunity to explore this discussion. This article examines the concepts underlying the new robotics exhibition with a special focus on the challenges of building up and keeping in existence the museum’s collection of robots as well as the challenges of exhibiting and imparting objects from a relatively new and fast-moving field of research such as robotics in a permanent exhibition.
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Manolis Simos, Konstantinos Konstantis, Konstantinos Sakalis, and Aristotle Tympas
“AI Can Be Analogous to Steam Power” or From the “Post-Industrial Society” To the “Fourth Industrial Revolution”: An Intellectual History of Artificial Intelligence, pp. 97-116
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This article provides an intellectual history of artificial intelligence in the electronic era of computing, that is, from the postwar decades to the present. We argue for the existence of two periods; a first period, defined by the discourse of a post-industrial society and an information age, and a second one, characterised by the discourse of a fourth industrial revolution. Discourses of a post-industrial society and a fourth industrial revolution are constitutively related to discourses of computer automation, which, in turn, are defined by artificial intelligence. This paper provides a canvas of an intellectual history of artificial intelligence in the electronic era through the examination of discourses of this period on computer automation.
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Tiina Männistö-Funk
“One Fine Day Your Car Will Also Start to Speak”: Automotive Voices as Promises of Machine Intelligence, pp. 117-138
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The first half of the 1980s saw a talking cars fad. Several manufacturers provided models that could remind their driver of things like open doors and low fuel, making use of newly available speech synthesis technology. Talking cars were not intelligent but, as this article demonstrates, they carried and negotiated the idea of machine intelligence. They were part of the cultural anticipation of artificial intelligence, reproduced by intelligent robot cars in media representations as well as repeated promises of thinking and talking machines by both developers and manufacturers. This cultural context made talking cars alluring, but also disappointing. They triggered questions of control that today are topical again in the discussions regarding autonomous vehicles.
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Katerina Vlantoni and Kornilia Papanastasiou
Historicising the Integration of Artificial Intelligence into Biomedicine, pp. 139-157
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This article introduces to a history of the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into biomedicine, based on accounts of AI that were published in journals of biomedical, medical, scientific and engineering communities during the last half century. These accounts were full of promises ab out the future of each new generation of AI, but, also, assessments of how the preceding generations of AI did not manage to deliver according to what was promised. We read such accounts together in order to capture both a narrative of unbound progress and of failure regarding the use of AI (and computing in general) in virtually all medical specialties and fields. This article contributes to the historiography of AI by retrieving this contrast between a progressivist ideology and a reality defined by limits in the integration of AI into biomedicine.
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Dick van Lente
Robots And Healthcare: The Deep Roots of a Technological Fix, pp. 158-178
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This essay explores the tendency to over-estimate the potential of technological solutions which are being developed to deal with the ever-increasing demand for healthcare in western countries. It proposes an explanation of this tendency in terms of a cybernetic approach to illness and medical care. It interprets this tendency as a form of what, in the 1960s, came to be called a “technological fix,” and it explores the long history of such patterns of thought.
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