One of my latest sticking points is the usage of pronouns to refer to bots. While I realize there is a longstanding tradition of using personal pronouns (she, he, her, and his) to refer to machines, I have real problems anthropomorphizing bots. It just strikes me as a slippery slope for an academic to engage in. At the same time, calling the famed Tifanny_bot “it” all the time is just clunky.

My solution to this dilemma came from an unlikely source: John Leguizamo. Driving home from the hospital I heard him interviewed on NPR’s Fresh Air. Discussing his work on To Wong Foo Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar, he mentioned that the studio hired a Drag Queen to coach him and said something along the lines of: “They hired *pause* ohh, I can’t remember his real name. Her drag name was [X] and she taught me everything.” And that got me thinking about gender designations when it comes to drag. Clearly the absolute (genital/chromosome) sex of the performer never changed. He was a he. But while in the drag role the performer assumed the gender designation being performed. Like Lou Reed once wrote “then he was a she.”

What this suggests is that culturally the chatterbot program itself can be considered an “it” while the self it performs, Tiffany for example, can be referred to as “she.”

Or perhaps trudging forward. Drea’s recovery continues to be rocky. For every step forward she takes, she seems to fall a step back. So that has taken a toll on both our spirits. The current hope is for her to come home next Monday.

I’m trying to write. It’s tough to keep myself focused. And I just don’t have the energy to even train right now. So that’s a bit of a blow as well.

On the positive side, I’ve been pounding through “fun reading.” I just wrapped up on Douglas Coupland’s microserfs, which I’m most likely going to use as part of my thesis. I also finished Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince in less than 20 hours. The Rochester D&C ended up running my capsule review on their website (you’ll have to search on my name to find it). I decided to write the review as a developmental exercise.

[annotation: *blows off the dust *… it’s been a while. Over the next few days I will endeavor to lay out a number of ideas that are being developed for my research work]

One of the ideas that has been cropping up is that Chatterbots (in particular sexbots) can be used a a social sciences tools to identify the essentials of specific genres at a specific time. For a sexbot like the famed Tiffany to work it must be capable of deploying the characteristics and tools that a webcam girl is expected to invoke during a conversation. Thus by examining a successful bot, we can learn what is, at a bare minimum, expected of a genre during an interaction.

serendipitously, while pondering this idea, I happened to read the following passage in Douglas Coupland’s microserfs:

I mentioned to Abe about my lessons in shiatsu and the weird relationship people in tech firms have with their bodies. He replied:

I know what you mean about bodeis. At Microsoft you pretend bodies dont’ exist… BRAINS are what matter. You’re right, at Microsoft bodies get down played to near invisibility with unsensual Tommy Hilfiger geekwear, or are genericized with items form the GAP so that employees morph themelfves into those international symbols for MAN and WOMAN you see at airports. (Coupland, 1995: 198)

This in turn got me to thinking about the relationship between mechanization and the essentials of a particular role. Take for example, robotic factory workers. The ones that most likely spring to mind are those in car assembly plants. We’ve all seen the footage of them attaching doors and welding joints. The many of these robots are simply arms (often with integrated tools). Each role has been optimized to the bare essentials required of that position. Why create the whole robot body when only the arm is needed. Thus it seems, that by examining these forms of industrial mechanization, we can understand exactly what is essential for that specific role. Thus the chatterbot can be related to its robotic cousin working on the assembly line.

Bibliography

Coupland, Douglas. 1995. microserfs. New York: ReganBooks.