I WOULD NOT WASTE YOUR TIME WITH TRIVIA, SO HERE IS SOMETHING OF IMPORTANCE AND DEPTH.  PUT EVERYTHING ELSE ASIDE, PLEASE:  From College Fix: 

What’s the first thing you think of when someone mentions robots? “The Terminator”? “The Matrix”? Data from “Star Trek: The Next Generation”?

Most normal folk likely would offer one of those … and perhaps “Battlestar Galactica,” “The Day the Earth Stood Still” and Isaac Asimov’s books.

Will they become self-aware and take us over,  we wonder.

But if you’re on staff at a women’s, gender & sexuality studies department, mechanical beings might have you ponder how they “intersect with race, patriarchy, colonialism and capitalism.”

On March 2, Brown University’s Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America hosted two professors from such departments (University of Maryland-College Park, and Yale) who did just that.

According to the event’s description, Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora (pictured) “trace[d] the ways in which robots, artificial intelligence, and other technologies serve as surrogates for human workers within a labor system entrenched in racial capitalism and patriarchy.”

They also noted “while these new technologies and engineering projects promise a revolutionary new future, they replicate and reinforce racialized and gendered ideas about devalued work, exploitation, dispossession, and capitalist accumulation.”

In an interview before the event, Atanasoski said it’s important to make sure advances in technology don’t just keep “reproducing what we already have.” As an example, Vora noted the U.S. military’s Atlas Robot which can “independently navigate complex terrain, lift heavy objects and recover itself after falling.”

As such, Vora alleged that Atlas “employs fantasies of human autonomy and command, together […] values that we identify with the often violent history of globalism. These robots […] fulfill the fantasy for (a perpetuation) of enslaved labor. They cannot rebel.”

Vora, a “History of Consciousness” PhD who once ran UC Davis’s Feminist Research Institute, was dubbed a “spectacular” hire by Yale last year where she taught the course “Science and Technology Studies: Anti-racist and Feminist Approaches to Technoscience.”

COMMENT:  I just thought you'd like to know.  Your federal education dollars at work. 

March 12, 2023