In particular, I focus on race and how the Asian American is racialized as machine, and the robot in particular as a primary locus of racialization for Asian Americans. In this essay, I trace the theoretical genealogy of the representational processes of making and unmaking human and machine demarcations within the context of the US empire. This work includes delving into cuts, and soldering across the various parts. I've been searching, and in my search, I find my robot within and in the gaps between the deep legacy of feminist science and technology theorizing, philosophical engagements on the human and posthuman, discourses and algorithms in robotics, racial theory, histories of the labor movement, and the feminist cyborg. KEYWORDS: Human-Robot Interaction, Social Theory, Cultural Theory, Onomastics. My thesis suggests that competitions function as a birth rite of passage, and that naming dubs or introduces the new being to the world and brings the world into the robot. Robot naming demonstrates human-robot social relationships and both slave, pet and hybrid naming characteristics. My conclusion is that robot naming in competitions is a performance of companion species co-shaping in the contact zone between organic/technic, master/slave and subject/object, supporting the ‘robots as new ontological category’ hypothesis. et al), and further poses the questions, how does this come about and what does that mean? Donna Haraway has made interspecies translation her specialty and so I knit this investigation of a new being becoming into her ‘cats cradle’ with both factual and fictional robots. Overall, this data supports the ‘robot as a new ontological category’ hypothesis (Kahn Jr. The names demonstrate interesting levels of ‘subjectification’ in even the least anthropomorphic or lifelike of robots. Names reflected human/machine hybridity, as well as anthropomorphism. Most robots in competitions were named and gendered as well. Many interesting names and connections appeared. This thesis is the result of a sociological survey into the naming practices of competition robots, informed by my auto- ethnographic research into the culture of robot competitions. The naming of robots bears witness to their emergence as a new ontological category, birthed in robotics competitions, forming a laboring companion species. We conclude, again following Haraway, by imagining what other possibilities there might be for figuring humans, robots, and their relations if we escape the reiterative imaginary of the robot as proxy for becoming human. Primate and robot together are forms of natureculture that help to clarify how the categories of animal and machine are entangled, while making explicit investments in their differences from one another, and from the third category of the human. We follow the trope of ‘model organism’ as it is under discussion within science and technology studies and as an ironic descriptor for our own interest in Lucy as an entity/project through which to illuminate figurations within robotics more widely. One aspect of Lucy’s figuration by Grand, we argue, which ties her to Haraway’s analysis of the primate, is of the robot as a model for animal, and more specifically (or aspirationally) human, cognition. We take as our model (in)organism ‘Lucy the Robot Orangutan’, roboticist Steve Grand’s project to create an artificial life form with a mind of its own. This article explores the resonating figures of primate, child, and robot in contemporary technoscientific corporealizations of the ‘almost human’.
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