Hosted by the School of Psychological Science
Abstract: Robots are often argued to occupy a unique ontological category in the human mind, somewhere between artifact and person, somewhere between engineering and science fiction. Yet few roboticists acknowledge the way that robots grew to occupy this niche. In this talk, I will begin by describing robots' cultural origination in the White Supremacist ambitions in the 19th-century United States. After laying this groundwork, I will then describe several ways that the design and deployment of modern robots continue to reinforce White Supremacy across multiple domains of power, and the need for roboticists to adopt new theoretical lenses (both psychological and sociological) in order to better understand the implications of their design processes, and new tools of responsible design to ensure that the robots of the future are wielded as a force for good.