I embarked upon this immersive research project in order to experience and find solutions to issues with domestic robotic adoption from a practical perspective. The goal was to develop my expertise from lived experience rather than theory so that nuanced or unexpected tensions in law, policy and infrastructure could be revealed through the monotony of everyday life.  You might expect rather technical conversations surrounding my work.  But surprisingly, a more human element injects itself into the conversation before I can even get there, as the inquiries all begin in the same way. “So you live with him? Her? It?” In only a few words, each discussion can’t help but run into the same question before any other. Is it female or male? Tova is an it.

Why? Tova is a prototype of a domestic humanoid robot which will help with household chores like cooking, cleaning and laundry. Domestic labor has long been culturally “women’s work” and we don’t need to be enshrining these perceptions from the past into a new age of humanity.  If men and women are both working outside of the home then why should the cooking and cleaning still fall to the woman in a mixed household? If it’s falling to a robot, why should we continue notions that it’s the responsibility of a female at all?  The complex relationship between AI and gender began in the early 2010s with Siri and Alexa.  As intellectual capacity grew from assistants to knowledge workers, gender was explicitly rejected. The arc of this transition to post-gender identity loses the benefit of the doubt for its just motivation if female personalities magically return the moment a mop is placed into a robotic hand. Gender cannot only be present when the labor being performed is perceived as low status.  Let’s ditch the idea of needlessly gendering our domestic robots and start off referring to them as “it” before we risk bringing the biases of the past into the age of AI.

Emily Genatowski is an experimental AI robotics researcher who lives full time with a humanoid robot at her residence in Vienna, Austria where she is pursuing her PhD in Digital Humanities at the University of Vienna.  A former lead at Google Arts & Culture, she holds degrees from Harvard and Columbia University. Emily writes about her experience and lectures widely across Europe where she recently gave a TED Talk at TED AI on the lessons learned from a year living with a robot. She will be contributing articles covering the Technology sector to the newly established, bi-weekly Forbes.at Women’s Newsletter and surfacing women’s perspectives on emerging innovation. Click the link below to subscribe.