Listen now as I get Down Under the hood of what is really going on behind Pepper the robot, with Maleen Jayasuriya.
It’s so easy to bond with cute things that speak the same language as us. Typical anthropomorphisation as people referred to Pepper as ‘her’ and mentioned its emotions.
We allocate intelligence, talk of sapience and sentience, speak to consciousness and life itself all in the same breath - but are they all really the same thing?
I wanted answers - I wanted to speak with someone who holds the controls and is responsible for the actual programming of robots like Pepper.
So, I met with Maleen - a Robotics Engineer, Academic and Artist with a performance theatre background - as part of the Robots in the Room project currently underway with the Centre for Deliberative Democracy at the University of Canberra, in collaboration with the Collaborative Robotics Lab (CRL).
As I observed the experimentation of the inclusion of robots in democratic deliberation and potentially decision-making, sitting around the table with human participants - it raised many questions around our relationships with embodied AI agents.
“To be an embodied agent, one needs to be both embodied and embedded” - Stelarc
The above quote is on the CRL banner you can see in the lab in our background - its from an Australian performance artist, which is fitting not only because of Maleen’s background too but because of the origins of the word ‘robot’ itself…
Did you know - the etymology of the word robot is not Greek or Latin - instead it has Slavic roots, first used by a Czech playwright and essentially means slave labour!
(Why is it playwright and not playwrite btw? Anyway we digress…)
So there is clearly a common theme emerging here of performance theatre and forced labour… are we creating intelligent, sentient beings, or mere puppets to do our bidding? Even if you don’t believe these machines are ‘alive’, is this ethical?
“Nothing really is artificial - we are of nature, and by extension everything we create is also just an extension of us”
To find out who said this quote, whether it was Maleen or Viktor Frankenstein - you’ll have to listen to the podcast 😎
Maybe through more conversations like this, we can Make Technology Great Again.®️
#MTGA®️ merch coming soon!
After listening to this episode, if you have any burning questions or realisations - we’d love to hear from you! Feel free to leave a comment below or send a message on the ANTIPARTY homepage.
🎧 Song credits: Flight of the Conchords (yes I know they are from New Zealand, not Australia!) It was hilarious to imagine Pepper singing this song…
