Gender in the Cybernetic Fold

The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, Third Edition, 2007

The past twenty years have seen an expanding engagement at the intersection of feminist scholarship and science and technology studies (STS). This corpus of research is now sufficiently rich that it invites close and more circumscribed reviews of its various areas of concentration and associated literatures. In that spirit, the aim of this chapter is to offer an integrative reflection on engagements of feminist STS with recent developments in a particular domain of science and technology, which I designate here as the sciences of the artificial. 1 Building on previous discussions relating the perspectives of feminist research to technology more broadly, the focus of this chapter is on developments at the shifting boundary of nature and artifice as it figures in relations between humans and computational machines. Central projects are those collected under the rubric of the cognitive sciences and their associated technologies, including Artificial Intelligence (AI), robotics, and software agents as well as other forms of embedded computing. 2 Central concerns are changing conceptions of the sociomaterial grounds of agency and lived experience, of bodies and persons, of resemblance and difference, and of relations across the human/machine boundary. In framing my discussion with reference to feminist STS my aim is not to delineate the latter into a discrete subdiscipline somehow apart from science and technology studies more broadly. Not only are the interconnections-historical and conceptualfar too thick and generative to support a separation, but such territorial claims would be antithetical to the spirit of the scholarship that I have selected to review. The point of distinguishing feminist-inspired STS from the wider field of research, and the "sciences of the artificial" from technosciences more broadly, is rather to draw the boundaries of this particular chapter in a way that calls out certain focal interests and concerns. I include here work done under a range of disciplinary and methodological affiliations, most centrally feminist theory, but also the sociology of science, cultural anthropology, ethnomethodology, and information studies and design. The connecting thread for the writings that I discuss is an interest in questioning antecedents and contemporary figurings of human/technology relations through close historical, textual, and ethnographically based inquiry. The research considered here is distinguished from technology studies more broadly by a critical engagement with (1) technosciences founded on the trope of "information"; (2) artifacts that are "digital"

differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 2003

European Journal of Futures Research, Springer Publisher, 2014

This study aims to shed light on the debate about the futures of gender, by taking into account its significance in the current development of Artificial Intelligence (AI), cyborg technologies and robotics. Its reflections are sustained by empirical data obtained between November 2010 and January 2011, when the author engaged in a study related to Gender and Artificial Intelligence at the Department of Cybernetics, University of Reading (England) under the supervision of Professor Kevin Warwick, known as the first human cyborg for his experiments “Cyborg I” (1998) and “Cyborg II” (2002). In this context, the author formulated a questionnaire which was answered by more than one hundred students and researchers of the Department. The specific question motivating this research was: how and to what extent do gender and the intersectional differences characterizing the human species inform the development of cyborgs, robots and AI? The results of the questionnaire, presented in this article, offer original and controversial perspectives on how such epistemological approaches may impact the futures.

European Journal of Futures Research, 2014

This study aims to shed light on the debate about the futures of gender, by taking into account its significance in the current development of Artificial Intelligence (AI), cyborg technologies and robotics. Its reflections are sustained by empirical data obtained between November 2010 and January 2011, when the author engaged in a study related to Gender and Artificial Intelligence at the Department of Cybernetics, University of Reading (England) under the supervision of Professor Kevin Warwick, known as the first human cyborg for his experiments "Cyborg I" (1998) and "Cyborg II" (2002). In this context, the author formulated a questionnaire which was answered by more than one hundred students and researchers of the Department. The specific question motivating this research was: how and to what extent do gender and the intersectional differences characterizing the human species inform the development of cyborgs, robots and AI? The results of the questionnaire, presented in this article, offer original and controversial perspectives on how such epistemological approaches may impact the futures.

Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 2018

Sheldon Richmond has written an insightful and exhaustive review of my book The Nature of the Machine and the Collapse of Cybernetics: A Transhumanist Lesson for Emerging Technologies (Palgrave Macmillan 2017). Richmond voices concerns regarding some suggestions I made about the future of humanity vis-à-vis a contemporary cybernetic re-instantiation in the form of Emerging Technologies. He suggests that future cybernetically rooted sciences (and the transhumanist technologies that come along with them) can pose peril for the human condition. This reply is intended to clarify certain points that Richmond brings up, by means of (a) responding to his suggestion that cybernetics and transhumanism could be independently understood, and (b) unveiling a metaphysical and ethical stance, shared by Richmond, critical to the observations I made regarding a “cybernetically organized mankind” made possible by Emerging Technologies. I identify Richmond’s position as (a) precautionary in nature, (b) for reasons perhaps more ethical than epistemological, somewhat out of sync with the cybernetic ethos.

History of the Human Sciences, 2020

ToC and Intro to the special issue of 'History of the Human Sciences' co-edited with Leif Weatherby

Spanda Monitor, XV, 4-8 (10)., 2024

The "Meeting in the Cave" awareness play. A time-space-specific operatic installation performance in both worlds and two continents. The "Cave 3.0" libretto. Act I.2, The Hermaphrodite & the Robot. Getting Closer - Haah the Hologram & Rooh the Robot; Amaterasu & Uzume. Subnarrative: Gender & Artificial Intelligence.

Should intelligent agents and robots possess gender? If so, which gender and why? The authors explore one root of the gender-in-AI question from Turing’s introductory male-female imitation game, which matured to his famous Turing test examining machine thinking and measuring its intelligence against humans. What we find is gender is not clear cut and is a social construct. Nonetheless there are useful applications for gender-cued intelligent agents, for example robots caring for elderly patients in their own home.

Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, 2023

This research paper embarks on a comprehensive exploration of the complex interplay between gender biases and Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms, framed through the lens of cybernetic feminism. Drawing on a rich body of interdisciplinary literature, the paper critically examines how biases are not mere reflections of existing societal norms but are intricately woven into the very architecture of algorithms. The paper delves into various sectors impacted by these biases, including healthcare and employment, and underscores the ethical and policy implications arising from the use of biased algorithms. It argues for a multi-pronged, interdisciplinary approach to address these biases, highlighting the dynamic and evolving role of cybernetic feminism as both a methodological and ethical framework. The paper also outlines potential avenues for future research, emphasizing the need for longitudinal studies and a broader understanding of intersectional identities. By synthesizing key insights from seminal works in AI ethics, feminist theory, and legal studies, this paper serves as an urgent call to action, advocating for a more equitable digital future through concerted efforts across technological, ethical, and policy domains.

2002

Since the second half of the XXth century, researchers in cybernetics and AI, neural nets and connectionism, Artificial Life and new robotics have endeavoured to build different machines that could simulate functions of living organisms, such as adaptation and development, problem solving and learning. In this book these research programs are discussed, particularly as regard the epistemological issues of the behaviour modelling. One of the main novelty of this book consists of the fact that certain projects involving the building of simulative machine models before the advent of cybernetics are been investigated for the first time, on the basis of little known, and sometimes completely forgotten or unpublished, texts and figures. These pre-cybernetics projects can be considered as steps toward the “discovery” of a modelling methodology that has been fully developed by those more recent research programs, and that shares some of their central goals and key methodological proposals. More info in Springer link: http://www.springer.com/new+%26+forthcoming+titles+%28default%29/book/978-1-4020-0606-7 This book is the English translation of La scoperta dell'artificiale, Dunod/Masson, Milan, 1998.