The De Gruyter Handbook of Robots in Society and Culture

The De Gruyter Handbook of Robots in Society and Culture PDF

Author: Leopoldina Fortunati

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2024-09-23

Total Pages: 417

ISBN-13: 3110792338

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The De Gruyter Handbook of Robots in Society and Culture provides a comprehensive discussion of how social robots take form, function, and meaning for individuals, relationships, cultures, and societies. Through a path-breaking integration of perspectives coming from sociology, communication and media, psychology, cognitive neuroscience, anthropology, political science, and science and technology studies, it focuses on the critical and social meaning of present developments in social robotic technologies. This book looks at artificial agents – from voice-based assistants to humanoid robots— as their use transforms private and public contexts and gives rise to both new possibilities and new perils for human being and becoming, organizations as well as social structures and institutions. The handbook traces the consequences and key problems of social robotics across broad social contexts in both public and political as well as domestic and intimate spaces. Further, it attends carefully to the implications of social robotics for various human identity groups, including those based on gender, ethnicity, culture, class, ability, and age. Deep attention to interdisciplinarity, inclusivity, ethics, and socio-cultural futures serves as the guiding inspiration behind each contribution within this handbook.

The De Gruyter Handbook of Artificial Intelligence, Identity and Technology Studies

The De Gruyter Handbook of Artificial Intelligence, Identity and Technology Studies PDF

Author: Anthony Elliott

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2024-07-22

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 3110721759

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The De Gruyter Handbook of Artificial Intelligence, Identity and Technology Studies examines the relationship of the social sciences to artificial intelligence, surveying the various convergences and divergences between science and technology studies on the one hand and identity transformations on the other. It provides representative coverage of all aspects of the AI revolution, from employment to education to military warfare, impacts on public policy and governance and the future of ethics. How is AI currently transforming social, economic, cultural and psychological processes? This handbook answers these questions by looking at recent developments in supercomputing, deep learning and neural networks, including such topics as AI mobile technology, social robotics, big data and digital research. It focuses especially on mechanisms of identity by defining AI as a new context for self-exploration and social relations and analyzing phenomena such as race, ethnicity and gender politics in human-machine interfaces.

The De Gruyter Handbook of Automated Futures

The De Gruyter Handbook of Automated Futures PDF

Author: Vaike Fors

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2024-09-23

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 3110792346

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How does automation affect us, our environment, and our imaginations? What actions should we take in response to automation? Beyond grand narratives and technology-driven visions of the future, what more can automation offer? With these questions in mind, The De Gruyter Handbook of Automated Futures provides a framework for thinking about and implementing automation differently. It consolidates automated futures as an inter- and transdisciplinary research field, embedding the imaginaries, interactions, and impacts of automation technology within their social, historical, societal, cultural, and political contexts. Promoting a critical yet constructive and engaging agenda, the handbook invites readers to collaborate with rather than resist automation agendas. It does so by pushing the agenda for social science, humanities and design beyond merely assessing and evaluating existing technologies. Instead, the handbook demonstrates how the humanities and social sciences are essential to the design and governance of sustainable sociotechnical systems. Methodologically, the handbook is underpinned by a pedagogical approach to staging co-learning and co-creation of automated futures with, rather than simply for, people. In this way, the handbook encourages readers to explore new and alternative modes of research, fostering a deeper engagement with the evolving landscape of automation.

Animals, Machines, and AI

Animals, Machines, and AI PDF

Author: Erika Quinn

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2021-11-08

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 3110753677

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Sentient animals, machines, and robots abound in German literature and culture, but there has been surprisingly limited scholarship on non-human life forms in German studies. This volume extends interdisciplinary research in emotion studies to examine non-humans and the affective relationships between humans and non-humans in modern German cultural history. In recent years, fascination with emotions, developments in robotics, and the burgeoning of animal studies in and beyond the academy have given rise to questions about the nature of humanity. Using sources from the life sciences, literature, visual art, poetry, philosophy, and photography, this collection interrogates not animal or machine emotions per se, but rather uses animals and machines as lenses through which to investigate human emotions and the affective entanglements between humans and non-humans. The COVID-19 pandemic made us more keenly aware of the importance of both animals and new technologies in our daily lives, and this volume ultimately sheds light on the centrality of non-humans in the human emotional world and the possibilities that relationships with non-humans offer for enriching that world.

The De Gruyter Handbook of Artificial Intelligence, Identity and Technology Studies

The De Gruyter Handbook of Artificial Intelligence, Identity and Technology Studies PDF

Author: Anthony Elliott

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2024-07-22

Total Pages: 377

ISBN-13: 3110721848

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The De Gruyter Handbook of Artificial Intelligence, Identity and Technology Studies examines the relationship of the social sciences to artificial intelligence, surveying the various convergences and divergences between science and technology studies on the one hand and identity transformations on the other. It provides representative coverage of all aspects of the AI revolution, from employment to education to military warfare, impacts on public policy and governance and the future of ethics. How is AI currently transforming social, economic, cultural and psychological processes? This handbook answers these questions by looking at recent developments in supercomputing, deep learning and neural networks, including such topics as AI mobile technology, social robotics, big data and digital research. It focuses especially on mechanisms of identity by defining AI as a new context for self-exploration and social relations and analyzing phenomena such as race, ethnicity and gender politics in human-machine interfaces.

Robots that Talk and Listen

Robots that Talk and Listen PDF

Author: Judith Markowitz

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2014-12-12

Total Pages: 358

ISBN-13: 1614519153

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Robots That Talk and Listen provides a forward-looking examination of speech and language in robots from technical, functional, and social perspectives. Contributors address cultural foundations as well as the linguistic skills and technologies that robots need to function effectively in real-world settings. Among the most difficult and complex is the ability to understand and use language. Speech-enabled automata are already serving as interactive toys, teacher’s aides, and research assistants. These robots will soon be joined by personal companions, industrial co-workers, and military support automata. The social impact of these and other robots extends well beyond the specific tasks they perform. Contributors tackle the most knotty of those issues, notably acceptance of advanced, speech-enabled robots and developing ethical and moral controls for robots. Topics in this book include: •Language and Beyond: The True Meaning of “Speech Enabled” •Robots in Myth and Media •Enabling Robots to Converse •Language Learning by Automata •Handling Noisy Settings •Empirical Studies of Robots in Real-World Environments •Acceptance of Intelligent Robots •Managing Robots that Can Lie and Deceive •Envisioning a World Shared with Intelligent Robots

Anatomy of a Robot

Anatomy of a Robot PDF

Author: Despina Kakoudaki

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2014-07-07

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 0813572762

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Why do we find artificial people fascinating? Drawing from a rich fictional and cinematic tradition, Anatomy of a Robot explores the political and textual implications of our perennial projections of humanity onto figures such as robots, androids, cyborgs, and automata. In an engaging, sophisticated, and accessible presentation, Despina Kakoudaki argues that, in their narrative and cultural deployment, artificial people demarcate what it means to be human. They perform this function by offering us a non-human version of ourselves as a site of investigation. Artificial people teach us that being human, being a person or a self, is a constant process and often a matter of legal, philosophical, and political struggle. By analyzing a wide range of literary texts and films (including episodes from Twilight Zone, the fiction of Philip K. Dick, Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go, Metropolis, The Golem, Frankenstein, The Terminator, Iron Man, Blade Runner, and I, Robot), and going back to alchemy and to Aristotle’s Physics and De Anima, she tracks four foundational narrative elements in this centuries-old discourse— the fantasy of the artificial birth, the fantasy of the mechanical body, the tendency to represent artificial people as slaves, and the interpretation of artificiality as an existential trope. What unifies these investigations is the return of all four elements to the question of what constitutes the human. This focused approach to the topic of the artificial, constructed, or mechanical person allows us to reconsider the creation of artificial life. By focusing on their historical provenance and textual versatility, Kakoudaki elucidates artificial people’s main cultural function, which is the political and existential negotiation of what it means to be a person.

Robot Ecology

Robot Ecology PDF

Author: Magnus Egerstedt

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2021-12-28

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 0691230072

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A revolutionary new framework that draws on insights from ecology for the design and analysis of long-duration robots Robots are increasingly leaving the confines of laboratories, warehouses, and manufacturing facilities, venturing into agriculture and other settings where they must operate in uncertain conditions over long timescales. This multidisciplinary book draws on the principles of ecology to show how robots can take full advantage of the environments they inhabit, including as sources of energy. Magnus Egerstedt introduces a revolutionary new design paradigm—robot ecology—that makes it possible to achieve long-duration autonomy while avoiding catastrophic failures. Central to ecology is the idea that the richness of an organism’s behavior is a function of the environmental constraints imposed by its habitat. Moving beyond traditional strategies that focus on optimal policies for making robots achieve targeted tasks, Egerstedt explores how to use survivability constraints to produce both effective and provably safe robot behaviors. He blends discussions of ecological principles with the development of control barrier functions as a formal approach to constraint-based control design, and provides an in-depth look at the design of the SlothBot, a slow and energy-efficient robot used for environmental monitoring and conservation. Visionary in scope, Robot Ecology presents a comprehensive and unified methodology for designing robots that can function over long durations in diverse natural environments.

Medieval Robots

Medieval Robots PDF

Author: E. R. Truitt

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2015-06-11

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 0812246977

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Medieval robots took such forms as talking statues, mechanical animals, or silent metal guardians; some served to entertain or instruct while others performed surveillance or discipline. Medieval Robots explores the forgotten history of real and imagined machines that captivated Europe from the ninth through the fourteenth centuries.

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