The Digital Human: Subservience

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 30 December 2020

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Aleks Krotoski finds out if how we treat our subservient robots impacts how we treat one another. As with any new invention, domestic robots illuminate issues within human society that we may not have noticed before. Are we projecting old social norms of hierarchy and gender onto this new technology?

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, I'm Alex Kratoski, and this is the Digital Human for the documentary on the BBC World Service.
0:06.0	First broadcast on BBC Radio 4, but specially curated for you.
0:11.0	Today, we want to know if how we treat robots changes how we treat one another.
0:17.0	Alexa turn on the lights in the living room.
0:21.0	Okay.
0:24.0	Alexa.
0:27.0	Play the news.
0:29.0	Here's your flash briefing.
0:32.0	In BBC News from tune in
0:34.3	Alexa stop
0:37.9	Alexa what happens if I say please to you?
0:42.2	Hmm. I'm not sure.
0:46.0	Today on the digital human, we're looking at how the way we treat our domestic robots
0:52.0	affects how we treat one another.
0:54.0	Follow the conversation on Twitter with the hashtag DigiHuman.
0:59.1	Now I don't know if I've mentioned this before,
1:01.0	but I live in a house full of robots. We live in a house full of robots. We live in the future.
1:06.1	That's my family and I and we share our space with a little horde of servant machines that
1:10.3	turn the lights on and off or they set timers or they give us the news.
1:15.0	Sometimes it does make me a little uncomfortable.
1:18.0	As with any new invention though, domestic robots show us our human edges, those social niceties that we assume
1:25.9	that everyone adheres to, but it turns out not everybody does.
	...

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