Pop Culture Lens on Robots, Anthropomorphism, and Ethics

In this video, part of the new YouTube Channel for The Pop Culture Lens, you will hear an excerpt from a lecture I gave on robots. In this excerpt, I discuss the nature of robots and how it intersects with the concept of anthropomorphism. I make the argument for why such anthropomorphism, and zoomorphism, occurs, […]

Gendering Robots: A Class Discussion

The next research project I hope to work on looks at how people make sense of robots. I am particularly interested in how people apply gendered assumptions and attributions to robots or artificial agents, and how apply those assumptions then impact how people engage with robots. In a sense, robots have become another medium as […]

Gendering Robots 2005 Proposed Research Methods

As discussed in the previous post Gendering Robots 2006 Research Proposal, I have been thinking about doing research on how people make sense of the gendered nature of robots, AI, and other artificial agents — apparently for longer than I remembered! Here is the method section I wrote over a decade ago for how to […]

Gendering Robots 2005 Research Proposal

Recently, the question of how we attribute gender to asexual entities like robots and AI has been something I have been pondering more and more. How we understand engage with entities like Alexa from Amazon, Siri from Apple, and Cortana from Microsoft is fascinating, as well as how we think about robots like BB-8 or […]