Description
The idea killer robot standing in for a vast complex of human intelligence, producing and analyzing data, machine learning, and targeting and more stands as a kind of well-known figure of imagination standing in for the complex human/technological systems that produce certain humans as ‘targets’ of violence. I examine the ‘thingliness’ or the ‘objectness’ of the AI through the figuration of the robot, especially in its socio-technical imaginaries as an embodied form in order to think through the production of the ‘human’ and its others. I explore the interlinked histories of war, capitalism, imperialism, gender, and race to argue that the AI robot figuration reveals the ongoing gendered racialization of the “human” subject. Engaging with Wynter, Amaro, McKittrick, Warren, and others, I argue that the figuration of ‘the robot’ serves as a map to illuminate how race, embodiment, reproduction, violence, and sovereignty are reproduced in the development of AI technologies, both in general, and specifically for use in war/policing/occupation. As laboring bodies, commodified flesh, fungible property, and reproducers of all of these, the figure of the enslaved and the figure of the robot bear an uneasy and uncanny resemblance and, I would argue, are produced in relation to each other. I argue here that the terror of ‘killer robots’ is in the reproduction of the relation from Fanon, the ‘becoming object’ in relation to a white body.
