655 BOOKS IN REVIEW This concern aside, Reddell’s book is a highly informative and thoughtprovoking read. It is a wonderful contribution to sf cinema, cinematic sound analysis, and, more generally, an understanding of the sf cinematic experience in various periods and countries. Reddell deftly articulates the profound intellectual and experimental dynamics that make up what is often considered to be a secondary element of the cinematic experience. Further, he greatly expands the examination of how, in concert with broader technological forces, the explorative and innovative nature of sound technologies circumscribes conceptions of possible futures and of potential interactions with the indeterminacy of the alien and of outer space.—Dylan Cree, Concordia University Distance and Intimacy. Jennifer Rhee. The Robotic Imaginary: The Human and the Price of Dehumanized Labor. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2018. 240pp. $108 hc, $27 pbk. The mechanisms we humans use officially and circumstantially to judge another’s humanness emerge from the realms of care work, domestic work, and emotional labor. Such work tends to operate under two interwoven rules: distance and intimacy. Both must be present to counterweigh the work of the healthcare assistant, the childcare provider, or the mental health counselor. Too little contact and we accuse our caregivers of bitter medicine; too much and we might feel the need to reciprocate the care we have received. Another way to frame the central problematic here might be to suggest that whoever gets to be the one in need is the one we describe as human. Now imagine that the caregiver is a robot giving off an electric hum and emoting according to cybernetic protocols. Jennifer Rhee’s The Robotic Imaginary explores the human as a conceptual category in search of the mechanisms of humanness and dehumanization. The book introduces many robots across its four chapters. Readers will meet ELIZA. Designed by Jospeh Weizenbaum in 1966, this screen-interface AI was used to emulate a therapist. It would first ask leading questions and later reference past user inputs to perform conversational acuity (33-37). Readers will meet Shakey, a robot designed by a team led by Nils Nilsson at the Stanford Research Institute between 1966 and 1972. Shakey uses a programmed map of a more-orless empty apartment along with basic sensory input to navigate. Shakey malfunctioned often and was a very early prototype for the robotic vacuum (7075 ). Readers will also meet Kismet, a robotic head programmed to learn from conversational inputs. Kismet’s speech patterns, inquisitiveness, and appearance are all designed so that conversation partners will underestimate the robot and treat it as a child, mentee, or dependant (101-105). The pattern of introducing uniquely likable robots designed for care, domestic, and emotional labor stops when the book returns in the fourth chapter to the subject with which it opens: drones. Rhee begins her study by comparing the dehumanizing experience of Yemenis living under the threat of drone strikes with a related yet distinct manner of dehumanization exhibited by drone operators in the United States. Rhee’s epigraphs include a statement by Yemeni Ezzaldeen Tuaiman, “They’re going to kill me next,” beside another made by drone operator Michael Haas, “Ever step 656 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 46 (2019) on ants and never give it another thought?” (1). Here two forms of dehumanization have taken effect, mediated by drone ballistics, flight tech, hardware, and software. Such dynamics are taken up in great detail in “Dying,” the book’s fourth chapter. But first Rhee offers a thoroughgoing elaboration of the cultural history of robotics and artificial intelligence, interspersed with excursions into robot aesthetics and cybernetic art. Rhee offers much more than a cultural history of robotics. The book focuses on history, but it does so in order to attend to the robotic imaginary, which Rhee defines as “the shifting inscriptions of humanness and dehumanizing erasures evoked by robots” (5). Robots call to mind certain figurations of both the human and the inhuman. For Rhee, the work of the robotic imaginary is simultaneously about forming humanizing connections between otherwise differentiated entities and dehumanizing divisions between otherwise similar entities. The robotic imaginary operates in the realm of metaphor and anti-metaphor, and such connections and disconnections...
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Oct 9, 2019
Fiona Andreallo + 1
Open Access
