This article explores the frailty of particular notions of 'actant' and 'affect' for an understanding of the emergent socialities that cross virtual and actual worlds. It uses work on robots and avatars to explore a humanly grounded theory of sociality. It discusses the virtual character of selves and social relations, and how forms of presence apparent in robotics and virtual worlds both enhance and augment our understanding of specifically human forms of sociality. It suggests that critiques of subject-object dualisms do not depend on a rejection of the distinctiveness of anthropos.
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In The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology
- Published (Print):
- 01 Mar 2012
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 48–63 (16 total)
Loneliness and Love
The Potential of Human-AI Relations as Explored by Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema
Abby Lauren Kidd
is attempting to communicate more positive and open-minded ideas about the future possibilities of AI. This sample includes Neill Blomkamp's Chappie ( 2015 ), Jake Schreier's Robot and Frank ( 2012 ), and Drake Doremus's Zoe ( 2018 ). Despite
Technological Animism
The Uncanny Personhood of Humanoid Machines
Kathleen Richardson
examines the role of animism in the creation and production of humanoid robots. I suggest that the concept of animism has broader applications in both ‘natural’ surroundings and the highly technological and experimental setting of robotics laboratories
In Social Analysis
- Published (Print):
- 01 Mar 2016
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 110–128 (19 total)
Welcome to the Machine
Artificial Intelligence on Screen 1
Rebekah Brammer
The earliest images of robots on the big and small screen were usually only vaguely humanoid; while they had something approximating a body, they were undeniably mechanical in nature. From The Jetsons ’ Rosie the android maid (voiced by Jean
In Social Anthropology/Anthropologie sociale
- Published (Print):
- 01 Feb 2019
- Article Type:
- Review Article
- Pages:
- 130–131 (1 total)
“Rights of Things”
A Posthumanist Approach to Law?
Doris Schweitzer
, Mother Earth). Finally, in a draft report on civil law, the European Parliament's Committee on Legal Affairs has proposed treating the most sophisticated autonomous robots as “electronic persons.” Increasingly, such multidimensional “rights of things” are
In Nature and Culture
- Published (Print):
- 01 Mar 2021
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 28–46 (19 total)
Voicing Pride and Futurity in the Age of A.I.
An Interview with Playwright Pao-Chang Tsai on Solo Date
Jing Chen and Pao-Chang Tsai
hopes of meeting Alain's ghost in the underworld. The futility of Ho Nien's endeavors are revealed, however, when he learns his own surprising true identity: Ho Nien is actually himself an A.I. robot (also known as B46098) that is being used to model and
Elizabeth Jochum, Graeme Stout, and Brian Bergen-Aurand
Jennifer Rhee, The Robotic Imaginary: The Human and the Price of Dehumanized Labor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018). 240 pp., ISBN: 978151790298 (paperback, $27)
Soraya Murray, On Video Games: The Politics of Race, Gender and Space (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2018). xv + 315pp., ISBN: 9781786732507 (PDF eBook, $82.50)
Ari Larissa Heinrich, Chinese Surplus: Biopolitical Aesthetics and the Medically Commodified Body (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018). 264 pp., ISBN: 9780822370536 (paperback, $25.95)
Nir Eisikovits
In the last seventy years the nature of war has changed dramatically. Rather than involving two or more national armies fighting in uniform and obeying an orderly chain of command, most organised violence since the end of the Second World War has been asymmetrical, involving a regular army on the one hand and militia or guerrilla forces on the other.1 At the same time, the nature of battle – the intense, adrenaline-fueled close quarters confrontation that has traditionally defined the very heart of our idea of war (Keegan 1983) – is also changing as a result of dramatic advances in our ability to fight remotely. The increasing role of robotic devices and drones in recent conflicts, as well as the exponentially growing potency of cyberwarfare, are changing what it means to do combat. Now, asymmetrical war has been around forever. Defeated armies and weaker parties have often turned to guerrilla tactics against stronger foes. But, in recent decades, asymmetrical war has become the primary form of violence we encounter. Similarly, the history of military technology has always been the history of killing at a growing distance (swords allow more distance than fists, longbows than swords, rifles than longbows and so on). And yet, recent years have seen a qualitative leap in what we can do from far away.
This issue of Transfers features five individual essays critically engaging with the promises promoted alongside new methods and purposes of mobility. Two essays, Martin Emanuel’s “From Victim to Villain: Cycling, Traffic Policy, and Spatial Conflicts in Stockholm, circa 1980” and Andrew V. Clark and colleagues’ “The Rise and Fall of the Segway: Lessons for the Social Adoption of Future Transportation,” circle around a core theme of Transfers with their fresh look at transportation, its vehicles, and its methods; two others, Noah Goodall’s “More Than Trolleys: Plausible, Ethically Ambiguous Scenarios Likely to Be Encountered by Automated Vehicles” and Gal Hertz’s “From Epistemology of Suspicion to Racial Profiling: Hans Gross, Mobility and Crime around 1900,” look at mobility’s social side. Fascinatingly consistent are the adjectives and adverbs that qualify the promises that are made for these technologies. Segways, for instance, were sustainable, enviro-friendly, shared. Smart, personalized, and robotic are some of the commonly invoked terms in the growing literature on this particular PMD (personal mobility device). Adverbial are the benefits of automated driving too: safe and liberating, both values desired by a nineteenth-century urbanized Austrian society that imagined the city as a space of settled inhabitants free of migrants and hence also free of crimes.