What is the feminist perspective on artificial intelligence?

Question

Feminism is known as foremost as a social movement that criticizes existing gender stereotypes and gives advice on how to overcome a male point of view.

Apart from the society which is defined by its political, economic and social relationship, there is an additional domain available called "cyberspace", which is a literature category invented in the early 1980s. Like other genres before, cyberpunk transforms developments from reality into an abstract space with the aim to describe futuristic scenarios.

Has academic feminism developed theories about the cyberpunk universe and especially to the problem of artificial life, or about other areas of artificial intelligence?

Answer 1

The paper Feminism Cyberpunk (1995) by Karen Cadora may answer your question. In the abstract, the author writes

Until very recently, cyberpunk has been a predominantly masculinist project with few strong female characters. Often characterized by a nostalgia for an organic, pastoral past, feminist sf remains largely untouched by cyberpunk's enthusiasm for technology. In the last few years, however, a handful of feminist writers have ventured into the field of cyberpunk, engaging with, and even taking pleasure in, the technology that their feminist predecessors avoided while overturning the politics of gender and sexuality espoused by their masculinist predecessors. The characters in feminist cyberpunk blur the boundaries between human and machine, human and animal, and the real and the unreal, deconstructing the human body without forgetting the real exploitation of specifically female bodies. The characters are partial, fragmented, polluted, yet ultimately successful. Feminist cyberpunk envisions something that feminist theory badly needs: multiply positioned subjects who can negotiate and succeed in a high-tech, postmodern world.

Answer 2

I am unsure about the cyberpunk portion of this, but there has been an extensive feminist literature developed under the topic of "Gynoids" and the gendering of robots and other forms of AI (like virtual assistants). These papers tend to argue that the choice of gender assigned by AI developers to their creations is reflective of implicit social views and biases. For example, Siri is a compliant servant, and was gendered (by default) as a woman by its creators. Proponents of this school might say that this reflects and perpetuates cultural trends that devalue women or portray them as passive or subservient.

Here are some example references that could serve as a start on this area, but I do not know this area well. Perhaps someone else can suggest some better ones:

• Gendering Humanoid Robots: Robo-Sexism in Japan

• Gynoids: The Impact of Female Robots in Real Life

• Jealousy 4.0? An empirical study on jealousy-related discomfort of women evoked by other women and gynoid robots