University Assistant, Philosophy of Media and Technology, University Vienna
I am going to emphasize the notion of “imagination” and its relation to the field of SR (Social Robotics/Social Robots) in terms of warfare and dual use. My interest is characterized by these questions: What is Robotic Imagination? Is Robotic Imagination possible? Does Robotic Imagination affect dual use or warfare? Becomes Robotic Imagination a peculiar asymmetric weapon? What forms of dual use of SR (in civil life) can we imagine? Could we thereby find ways to implement this technology into juristically adequate regulated societies? How could science fiction (such as Terminator etc.) influence our imagination of technological warfare by using SR? Might terrorists use Robotic Imagination for realizing attacks immediately within our democratic infrastructure (as SR are implemented in IT-networks and are directly operating in contact with civil human persons in everyday life situations)? Can SR in dual use situations be treated as combatants?
Following the epistemological investigations I presented during the 1st and 2nd TRANSOR meetings, I am going to start my tries to answer those questions by introducing imagination as a form of implicit knowledge. In a next step I will turn to the ethical and political consequences by revealing scenarios of SR dual use and clarifying the notions of asymmetric warfare, robotic warfare, information- and cyberwar. Hypothetically I am going to conclude by sketching the concept of Robotic Imagination as a genuine asymmetric security-political challenge. This will lead to some hypothesis, which should serve as a basis for the interactions during the workshop in order to understand SR also as potential weapons in new forms of non-symmetrical warfare. I am looking forward to a fruitful discussion!
Short bio: My name is Michael Funk (BA, MA in Philosophy of Technologies). I have been working as Research Assistant at the Department for Philosophy of Technology at TU Dresden for 6 years (2009-2015) and since 2016 I am working as University Assistant at the Department for Philosophy of Media and Technology at the University of Vienna. Since 2007 I am working on several questions about human- robot-interactions, have been giving several lectures and realizing publications about this topic. Since 2012 I am a TRANSOR member. My further interested in new warfare (not only robots, but also cyberwar, terrorism etc.) and current political developments in the European Security-Infastrcture are motivations for submitting this abstract to the TRANSOR III meeting as well.
Visual Culture, University of Copenhagen
Taking as its primary assumption that the relationship between real-world social robotics and cultural representations of robots is a symbiotic give-and-take, this talk addresses the perpetuation of traditional gendered norms both within cinema and contemporary Human-Robot-Interaction (HRI) -studies. The term ‘gendered robot’ is used here not only as anatomical reference, but also to imply traditional behavioural models associated with males and females: archetypes such as the combative macho man vs. the subservient yet alluring femme fatale.
Ironically, precisely these binary relations between man and women were sought to be upheaved by Donna Haraway in her seminal feminist essay “A Cyborg Manifesto”. The cyborg, or robot, in cinema has proved in many instances to have the exact opposite effect, and in fact reiterates gender norms through the mechanical body (ex: Terminator, Metropolis, Ex Machina). Now, a similar movement is being made apparent within the realm of robotics, as we are creating robot bodies and AI in our own image.
While one may initially posit that the humanoid robots would be confined to the silver screen, contemporary robotics is proving otherwise. With the creation of increasingly humanoid androids, roboticists are upending Mori’s uncanny valley and presenting human users with evermore humanlike machinic counterparts. These humanoids are inevitably manufactured as either male or female – depending on their function and purpose. Toshiba’s humanoid service robot Aiko Chihira was designed as ‘female’ in order to appear non-threatening to its human counterparts, for instance. Meanwhile, American RealDoll are producing sex mannequins which mimic the human body in proportion and tactility, while introducing AI in order to create bonafide sex robots.
The movement toward more life-like gendered robots for the purpose of sexualized HRI has already created debate within the academic community, raising issues of robot ethics (Kate Darling) and fears of a spill-over effect into human interactions (ex: Campaign Against Sex Robots). This talk will position itself within this critical discourse, asking open questions of how and why our technological counterparts are reinforcing binary gender identities rather than blurring these boundaries.
Short bio: MA in Visual Culture, University of Copenhagen, with a broad interest in peripheral imaginary figures within popular culture; particularly monsters and robots. Special interest in how science fiction cinema and television can contribute in shaping our understanding of possible futures, as well as help steer technological and sociological innovation and thought processes. General interest in fringe sciences and speculative futurologies as articulated through pop culture. Short bio: MA in Visual Culture, University of Copenhagen, with a broad interest in peripheral imaginary figures within popular culture; particularly monsters and robots. Special interest in how science fiction cinema and television can contribute in shaping our understanding of possible futures, as well as help steer technological and sociological innovation and thought processes. General interest in fringe sciences and speculative futurologies as articulated through pop culture.
In this presentation I shall take a critical perspective on the conceptions of transmission, imagination and culture. I raise the possibility that we tend to study the robot as a science fiction entity to understand our own imagination and in this process we reduce imagination to something ephemeral. However this object that is taken to represent the future could rather be seen as a cultural production of today. In accordance with a cultural-historical reading, when approaching culture, the unit of analysis is constituted by the word-meaning which is materially based (Vygotsky 1987). As such creating robots is both imagination and co-creation of culture. I will argue that this can be seen as transgressive acts rather than the result of transmission, which I use to underline how transmission becomes a problematic metaphor for learning and cultural change. Robots are the incarnation of our imagination and therefore enable aesthetic transformation. Imagination is the cognitive foundation and the creative processes by which aesthetic word-meaning is collaboratively co-constructed. Vygotsky, L.S. (1987). The collected works of L.S. Vygotsky: Vol. 1: Thinking and speech (R.W. Rieber & A.S. Carton, Eds.). New York: Plenum.
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University of Tampere, School of Information Sciences and currently at University of Copenhagen
Traffic is a regulated field of public life. Over time, certain social norms have been codified into traffic rules, and assuming everyone follows the traffic rules, social life can flourish in a fair, predictable and safe manner. Though the rules themselves have been designed to be easy to follow, and have been built into the environment to afford compliance, human deviations are unavoidable because of negligence, ignorance and error. On the other hand, computers "are rule-following simpletons", and therefore automating traffic should obviously be in everyone's interests. What could possibly go wrong?
In this presentation the imaginary of algorithms as a straightforward "recipes for action" is challenged by software executing in situ, it's behaviour being reliant not only on it's predetermined internal logic, but also on it's data inputs and knowledge representations, and embodied behaviour in control of autonomous, robotic vehicles in physical space.
For the purposes of discussion, the discourse about the promises of robotic cars is accepted. The focus of this presentation will be in imaginaries, or models, different "cognizers" in traffic are going to have to construct and maintain once the range of actors extends beyond humans. The ways how humans imagine software works is going to have implications for their behaviour in traffic; if software reliably follows a rule "if a human is approaching, stop" while controlling a robot car, why bother with zebra crossings? An alternative software imaginary is one of Tay, a recent Twitter-bot which was collaboratively taught to misbehave and violate social norms. What to think about the software workings of a number of robotic cars, are they different from one another? "How am I being perceived?" and "how am I being made sense of?" are two second order epistemological questions posed for further inquiry.
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Short bio: Mace Ojala is an undergraduate student at University of Tampere, School of Information Sciences and currently at University of Copenhagen. His interests are in Software Studies, particularly in phenomenology of software, situated execution of software, and software as a cultural object, actor and as a condition.
This presentation aims to open some questions about the relation between culture, imagination and technology. Following McLuhan's view that every introduction of a new medium influences the symbolic order within society, Anne Balsamo’s hypothesis is that all innovations rearrange culture, so that 'both technology and culture are created anew (...) What gets reproduced is a particular (and historically specific) form of technoculture.' (Balsamo, 2011) I aim to discuss more in detail what technoculture implicates, and what are the problematic aspects when researching within this field (researching 'imagination'). Thus, I would like to focus on methodological aspects and possible difficulties that researcher encounters when approaching this problem. Besides Anne Balsamo's term technoculture, I will briefly address different approaches of researching imagination: e.g. Arjun Appadurai's 'social imagination', Shani Orgad's 'global imagination' and Greg Battye's 'forensic imagination', whilst maintaining a close connection with the study of technology.
Short bio: Bojana Romic (PhD) is an independent researcher and video artist based in Copenhagen. Her main fields of study are aesthetics of technology, audience research and online learning. She teaches at RUC and Malmø University.
Aarhus University, Denmark
The topic ‘robots and imagination’ presents us with two questions: (Q1) ‘Does human-robot interaction involve imagination, and if so, how and in which sense?´ versus (Q2): ‘Does imagination play any role in how or why are we building robots?’
The focus of my talk is on (Q2), but I begin by addressing (Q1). In social robotics and HRI research interactions between humans and so-called ‘social’ robots are frequently described (A) using the de-realization operator ‘as if,’ and this procedure is commonly combined with two assumptions. First, authors in HRI assume (B) that the tendency of humans to apply the templates of human social interaction when interacting with ‘social’ robots is based on “the human tendency to anthropomorphize” (see e.g., Breazeal 2003). Second, authors in HRI and, especially, authors in robo-ethics assume (C) that human-robot interaction involve the human capacity for “make-believe”. I call this the “ABC of the standard conception of human-robot interaction.” In previous work (Seibt 2014 and forthcoming) I have argued that the de-realization operator in (A) should not be read as the ‘as-if’ of fictionalization but as the ‘as-if’ of simulation. The fictionalist reading of the ‘as-if’ stands and falls with the tenability of (C). I have argued against (C) that it is conceptually incoherent to assume that there could be fictional social interactions. Against (B) I have suggested that we need to distinguish between the human tendency to ‘anthropomorphize’ from the human tendency to ‘socialize’ their environment, that human-robot interaction involves the latter, and that the conditions and forms robot sociality can contribute to formulating a comprehensive descriptive framework for asymmetric social interactions, and more generally, for simulated social interactions. I briefly rehearse the relevant main elements of my criticism of the ‘ABC’ and derive a partial answer to (Q1).
In the main part of my talk I approach (Q2), engaging elements of phenomenological analysis. I suggest that, at bottom, our longstanding fascination with robots derives from our desire to understand a basic aspect of human cognition, namely, the temporality of futurity (i.e., the ‘phenomenal feel’ of future events) and, more specifically, phenomenal becoming. Thinkers of “being-as-becoming”—Heraclitus, Nietzsche, Bergson, Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze, and Badieu—maintain that we cannot devise a theory of becoming, i.e., that temporal creativity or (phenomenal) becoming cannot be characterized nor referred to. I explore the implications of this line of argument for an answer for (Q2) and, en route, find the missing element for a fuller answer to (Q1). I suggest that in experiences with ‘social’ robots we understand the interplay between sortal imagination and temporal imagination, which is at the heart of both temporal creativity/becoming and sociality.
Postdoctoral Researcher, Aarhus University
According to Gilbert Simondon, “the image is an array of motor tendencies, […] through the interaction between organism and milieu, it becomes a system receptive to incident signals, and allows the sensory-motor activity to exercise itself progressively.”(Gilbert, 2008) Simondon stressed the functional importance of the dynamic imagination as an integral aspect of organismic unfolding. This foreshadowed how mathematicians now describe the entangled co-evolution of geometry and cognition. Endebted to Poincaré, Gödel, Thom and Châtelet (among others), Giuseppe Longo and Francis Bailly describe the “singularity of the living” by underlining important distinctions between biological organisms, or extended critical systems, and the modes of being of discrete state, or algorithmic machines, such as those implemented in today’s artificial intelligence systems. For instance, according to them the discrete state machine is “horizonless”, that is, it iterates tirelessly “without any weariness nor boredom,” while organisms get tired “[a]fter a couple of iterations, […] stop [and] look to the horizon.” (Bailly and Longo, 2011) But this apparent shortcoming is a consequence of the fact that organisms are constituted upon perpetual phase transitions and are thus in a constant state of renormalization, or of “passing to the limit”. While discrete-state machines can manipulate indefinite series of individuals, they cannot envelope the series holistically. They hence fail to see the forest through the trees, leading to the typical hurdles of AI: the symbol-grounding problem, the frame problem, etc. I will argue that imagination can be understood in similar terms: it concerns the mechanism of perpetual “renormalization between local and global scales or relevance,” (Bailly, 2011) which characterizes the process of cognition, and the organism as an extended critical system. I will discuss what this implies for human-robot interaction.
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Short bio: Alexander Wilson is a postdoctoral researcher in communication and culture at Aarhus University, where he examines the logical and material conditions of experience with regard to technogenesis, ecology, prometheanism and various transhuman horizons as part of the Posthuman Aesthetics research project. He holds a PhD in philosophical aesthetics from UQAM (Montreal, Canada), where he investigated the question of mind and memory beyond the human, drawing from theories of complexity, emergence, systems theory, evolutionary dynamics and philosophies of process.
University College Dublin (UCD),
Ireland Industrial Research Institute and Measurements PIAP, Poland
A common assumption regarding social robotics is that it is largely inspired by science-fiction and other forms of imagining robots in a given socio-cultural context. Also, while social robots have their unique features and functionalities, their design often draws from the existing human characteristics and behaviours. Thus, designing social robots relies on a curious combination of imagination and imitation.
The very process of anthropomorphisation requires the use of imagination as it involves the attribution of human-like characteristics that robots actually do not have. It is worth noting however, that in the field of social robotics and Human-Robot Interaction, there have been also numerous attempts to literally reproduce human characteristics in robots rather than only simulate them (thus, the term “anthropomorphic” is not necessarily synonymous with the term “human-like”). Such an approach emphasises imitation rather than imagination and robot design rather than human interpretation of such design. This includes modelling robots after human beings or other living organisms. The emphasis on imitating rather than imagining human-like characteristics can be observed not only in specific approaches towards robot design but also particular views of robot users. It is not unusual for robot designers to assume that people react “automatically” towards anthropomorphic cues provided by the robot appearance and behaviour. Thus, while an exact imitation is not possible and perhaps not even wanted in robotics, human engagement with robots is often defined in terms of automatic triggers and evolutionary characteristics. In this sense, it is not only robotic systems but also human beings to lack imaginative and interpretive traits.
This work argues that such an approach is largely rooted in the biological and efficiency- driven perspective on humans. People are viewed as “social animals” and imitating living organisms in robots is a way to actually imitate human beings.
