Intersectional Automations


Book Description

Intersectional Automations explores a range of situations where robotics, biotechnological enhancement, artificial intelligence (AI), and algorithmic culture collide with intersectional social justice issues such as race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, and citizenship. As robots, machine learning applications, and human augmentics are artifacts of human culture, they sometimes carry stereotypes, biases, exclusions, and other forms of privilege into their computational logics, platforms, and/or embodiments. The essays in this multidisciplinary collection consider how questions of equity and social justice impact our understanding of these developments, analyzing not only the artifacts themselves, but also the discourses and practices surrounding them, including societal understandings, design choices, law and policy approaches, and their uses and abuses.




Social Robotics and the Good Life


Book Description

Robots as social companions in close proximity to humans have a strong potential of becoming more and more prevalent in the coming years, especially in the realms of elder day care, child rearing, and education. As human beings, we have the fascinating ability to emotionally bond with various counterparts, not exclusively with other human beings, but also with animals, plants, and sometimes even objects. Therefore, we need to answer the fundamental ethical questions that concern human-robot-interactions per se, and we need to address how we conceive of »good lives«, as more and more of the aspects of our daily lives will be interwoven with social robots.




Motherless Creations


Book Description

This book explains the elimination of maternal characters in American, British, French, and German literature before 1890 by examining motherless creations: Pygmalion’s statue, Frankenstein’s creature, homunculi, automata, androids, golems, and steam men. These beings typify what is now called artificial life, living systems made through manufactured means. Fantasies about creating life ex-utero were built upon misconceptions about how life began, sustaining pseudoscientific beliefs about the birthing body. Physicians, inventors, and authors of literature imagined generating life without women to control the process of reproduction and generate perfect progeny. Thus, some speculative fiction before 1890 belongs to the literary genealogy of transhumanism, the belief that technology will someday transform some humans into superior, immortal beings. Female motherless creations tend to operate as sexual companions. Male ones often emerge as subaltern figures analogous to enslaved beings, illustrating that reproductive rights inform readers’ sense of who counts as human in fictions of artificial life.




Christian Ethics and Biomedical Innovation


Book Description

In Christian Ethics and Biomedical Innovation, Stephen Goundrey-Smith outlines a strategy for future adoption of human enhancement technologies which will ensure that such technologies are a common good, a strategy which is appropriate for a pluralistic society, yet consistent with Christian ethical principles. Drawing on the history of biomedical innovation to date in pharmaceutical medicine, he argues that technological capability alone is not enough, and that the responsible adoption of enhancement technologies will require active ethical deliberation and robust public policy discourse. Goundrey-Smith argues that biomedical technology, ethics, and public policy together form an essential triad for appropriate future enhancement technology adoption. This approach helps to ensure that biomedical technologies introduced will be common goods, and to reduce the risk of their instrumental use. The use of any technology is closely linked to its sociopolitical and cultural context and, drawing on Augustine’s The City of God, Goundrey-Smith presents a theological vision for good biomedical technology innovation in human society.




Intersectional Socialism


Book Description

In the context of sustained economic and environmental crises, marked by extreme inequalities of wealth, rising xenophobia, racism and precarity, never has the need for a radical change of system been so pressing. This book is an invitation to think the world otherwise. The author breathes new life into socialist thought through the deployment of an intersectional lens, bringing diverse struggles for emancipation both within and outside the Global North into dialogue with one another. In doing so, he offers the kind of bold and holistic thinking the present situation calls for.




Raya Dunayevskaya's Intersectional Marxism


Book Description

Raya Dunayevskaya is one of the twentieth century’s great but underappreciated Marxist and feminist thinkers. Her unique philosophy and practice of Marxist-Humanism—as well as her grasp of Hegelian dialectics and the deep humanism that informs Marx’s thought—has much to teach us today. From her account of state capitalism (part of her socio-economic critique of Stalinism, fascism, and the welfare state), to her writings on Rosa Luxemburg, Black and women’s liberation, and labor, we are offered indispensable resources for navigating the perils of sexism, racism, capitalism, and authoritarianism. This collection of essays, from a diverse group of writers, brings to life Dunayevskaya’s important contributions. Revisiting her rich legacy, the contributors to this volume engage with her resolute Marxist-Humanist focus and her penetrating dialectics of liberation that is connected to Black, labor, and women’s liberation and to struggles over alienation and exploitation the world over. Dunayevskaya’s Marxist-Humanism is recovered for the twenty-first century and turned, as it was with Dunayevskaya herself, to face the multiple alienations and de-humanizations of social life.




Race After Technology


Book Description

From everyday apps to complex algorithms, Ruha Benjamin cuts through tech-industry hype to understand how emerging technologies can reinforce White supremacy and deepen social inequity. Benjamin argues that automation, far from being a sinister story of racist programmers scheming on the dark web, has the potential to hide, speed up, and deepen discrimination while appearing neutral and even benevolent when compared to the racism of a previous era. Presenting the concept of the “New Jim Code,” she shows how a range of discriminatory designs encode inequity by explicitly amplifying racial hierarchies; by ignoring but thereby replicating social divisions; or by aiming to fix racial bias but ultimately doing quite the opposite. Moreover, she makes a compelling case for race itself as a kind of technology, designed to stratify and sanctify social injustice in the architecture of everyday life. This illuminating guide provides conceptual tools for decoding tech promises with sociologically informed skepticism. In doing so, it challenges us to question not only the technologies we are sold but also the ones we ourselves manufacture. Visit the book's free Discussion Guide: www.dropbox.com




Intersectionality


Book Description

The concept of intersectionality has become a central topic in academic and activist circles alike. But what exactly does it mean, and why has it emerged as such a vital lens through which to explore how social inequalities of race, class, gender, sexuality, age, ability, and ethnicity shape one another? In this fully revised and expanded second edition of their popular text, Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge provide a much-needed introduction to the field of intersectional knowledge and praxis. Analyzing the emergence, growth, and contours of the concept of intersectionality, the authors also consider its global reach through an array of new topics such as the rise of far-right populism, reproductive justice, climate change, and digital environments and cultures. Accessibly written and drawing on a plethora of lively examples to illustrate its arguments, the book highlights intersectionality’s potential for understanding complex architecture of social and economic inequalities and bringing about social justice-oriented change. Intersectionality will be an invaluable resource for anyone grappling with the main ideas, debates, and new directions in this field. Also available as an audiobook.




Converging Minds


Book Description

This groundbreaking book explores the power of collaborative AI in amplifying human creativity and expertise. Written by two seasoned experts in data analytics, AI, and machine learning, the book offers a comprehensive overview of the creative process behind AI-powered content generation. It takes the reader through a unique collaborative process between human authors and various AI-based topic experts, created, prompted, and fine-tuned by the authors. This book features a comprehensive list of prompts that readers can use to create their own ChatGPT-powered topic experts. By following these expertly crafted prompts, individuals and businesses alike can harness the power of AI, tailoring it to their specific needs and fostering a fruitful collaboration between humans and machines. With real-world use cases and deep insights into the foundations of generative AI, the book showcases how humans and machines can work together to achieve better business outcomes and tackle complex challenges. Social and ethical implications of collaborative AI are covered and how it may impact the future of work and employment. Through reading the book, readers will gain a deep understanding of the latest advancements in AI and how they can shape our world. Converging Minds: The Creative Potential of Collaborative AI is essential reading for anyone interested in the transformative potential of AI-powered content generation and human-AI collaboration. It will appeal to data scientists, machine learning architects, prompt engineers, general computer scientists, and engineers in the fields of generative AI and deep learning. Chapter 1 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution- No Derivatives (CC-BY -ND)] 4.0 license.




Automation and Collaborative Robotics


Book Description

Understand the current and future research into technologies that underpin the increasing capabilities of automation technologies and their impact on the working world of the future. Rapid advances in automation and robotics technologies are often reported in the trade and general media, often relying on scary headlines such as “Jobs Lost to Robots.” It is certainly true that work will change with the advent of smarter and faster automated workers; however, the scope and scale of the changes is still unknown. Automation may seem to be here already, but we are only at the early stages. Automation and Collaborative Robotics explores the output of current research projects that are improving the building blocks of an automated world. Research into collaborative robotics (cobotics) is merging digital, audio, and visual data to generate a commonly held view between cobots and their human collaborators. Low-power machine learning at the edge of the network can deliver decision making on cobots or to their manipulations. Topics covered in this book include: Robotic process automation, chatbots, and their impact in the near future The hype of automation and headlines leading to concerns over the future of work Component technologies that are still in the research labs Foundational technologies and collaboration that will enable many tasks to be automated with human workers being re-skilled and displaced rather than replaced What You Will Learn Be aware of the technologies currently being researched to improve or deliver automation Understand the impact of robotics, other automation technologies, and the impact of AI on automation Get an idea of how far we are from implementation of an automated future Know what work will look like in the future with the deployment of these technologies Who This Book Is For Technical and business managers interested in the future of automation and robotics, and the impact it will have on their organizations, customers, and the business world in general