An episode of Super Tech Support about Jia Tolentino’s missing Bitcoin. A sequel to episode 91, continuing the investigation into how Alex Blumberg’s Uber account was hacked. Mars colonisation might benefit from self-reproducing robots preparing the planet for human habitation. In distinction to the dream of sex robots as objects for pure intercourse, the dream of robots that can reproduce (self-replicating machines that can make copies of themselves) is decidedly not about sex, at least traditionally talking. It featured Matt McMullen as a keynote speaker for its third annual meeting in 2018. McMullen, who owns a San Diego manufacturing unit to produce RealDolls intercourse dolls, hopes to manufacture sex robots based on his Realbotix prototypes. As an illustration, the 2015 television show Humans (AMC), currently in its third season (as of 2019), conjures a future wherein robots (known as synths) are designed for service (from childcare to cleansing and intercourse work). Though a number of completely different imaginaries of the form and perform of sex robots are presently circulating between human-pc interplay engineers and robotics designers in the nascent AI-enhanced intercourse dolls business, they all exist inside slim limits that bear analysis by way of their relationship to current norms of sexuality, desire, and reproduction.
All of this is finished utilizing LLM textual content analysis – which strikes me as a superb use of the tech, and which I feel might be usefully achieved in the UK given the superb work already carried out by the clerks of the Commons and Lords in transcribing every part in near-realtime for Hansard. To convey this gendered work into the sphere of seen, valued and socially productive work, these theorists named it reproductive labor.4See for example, Ellen Malos (ed.), The Politics of Housework, London, Allison & Busby, 1980. Expanding each the political-financial register to incorporate the affective work of reproducing the social life of staff, including sex, made the notion of labor as the basic category of world-making activity more inclusive. This is because though the relations of power for space colonization appear different to these of European and US empires in that this projection of sovereignty over new territories does not impose colonial rule over people or populations because none have ever inhabited the territory of Mars, the mythology of ‘human-free’ environments and ‘uncultivated’ land for the taking has always been a fundamental aspect of settler colonial relations.
If we have been to consider this course of in relation to Mars-colonization, we can infer that what is being replicated by robots is not just the robots themselves, but already present human lifeworlds and social relations, namely those who facilitate capital accumulation and colonial logics. Niska continues to show that she is a conscious being who can judge human immorality and refuse to be subservient. In the primary episodes of the show, the synths show no feelings of ache or suffering when they’re used and abused (that is, they don’t seem to be aware of being pure objects). This mannequin of refusal, which subsumes all oppositional consciousness into liberal types of rights and recognition, stands in contrast to collective politics of boycott, a strike, or revolution, and thus fails to significantly disrupt the structures of energy, desire, and hierarchy which are being refused. A global women’s rights organisation has published a report detailing laws that explicitly discriminate on the basis of intercourse around the world affecting women, ladies and their households. The responsive or interactive side of the robotic is what makes these robots ‘reproductive’ of current norms despite their seeming representation of a realm of queer sex and desire.
Sex with robots may not be biologically reproductive sex, but it is socially reproductive within the sense that it does not challenge, but quite perpetuates, social norms of desire that help the family economy and its ties to heteronormative want. Later feminist materialists addressed this situation, most prominently Silvia Federici, who theorizes the position of the enclosure and expropriation of women’s bodies above and past their reproductive capacities.6Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, Brooklyn, NY, Autonomedia, 2004. How then will we tackle the politics of machines, reasonably than biologically reproductive workers, in reproducing the capitalist social order by intercourse and self-reproduction? However, as women of colour and Black feminists have been fast to level out, for instance in Angela Davis’s critique of the Wages for Housework campaign (1983) and her evaluation of women’s social and biological reproductive activity under US chattel slavery (1971), the category of labor as excluding the exercise of enslaved and indentured individuals, as well as many different dominated subjects, preserved a notion of the subject who performs labor as the topic of history.5Angela Y. Davis, “The Approaching Obsolescence of Housework: A Working-Class Perspective”, in Women, Race & Class, New York, NY, Vintage Press, 1983, pp.
