Anthropology

I studied the making of robots and AI as my PhD project at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge. Since my original research I have visited numerous labs around the world and spoken to engineers and computer scientists about the work they do. In robotic labs I write about the development of “social” robots and early experiments in normalising relationships between people and technologies. I wrote about my fieldwork experiences in my first monograph, An Anthropology of Robots and AI: Annihilation Anxieties and Machines (2015). 

In the last decade anthropology has become an activist discipline and actively prohibited discussion on sex and other issues. The US and Canadian anthropological leadership demonstrated their ideological credentials when they banned several female academics from speaking critically about gender at the 2023 American Anthropological Association Annual event. 

While I still incorporate anthropological methods into my practice as an academic, my work has been to challenge both the dualism and the conceptually dissolving tenets of the discipline. 

I am particularly concerned that anthropology produces ideas that pose a risk to children as it is rooted in cultural relativism. 

Ethics of Technology

After working in anthropology for several years my career trajectory took me to the Centre for Computing and Social Responsibility at De Montfort University. Therefore my work for over the last decade has focused on ethics of robots, AI and VR/XR/AR technologies. This has informed my academic work and activism. 

In 2015 I launched the Campaign Against Sex Robots (now Porn Robots) to warn of two processes: 1) the normalising of anthropomorphised property forms rationalised as capable of sex, love or relationship and 2) the damaging effects this will have in a global culture where women and girls bear the brunt of male violence, much of it legalised in pornography and prostitution.

I am now based at the Digital Future Institute at De Montfort University where I continue my work on the anthropology and ethics of technology.

Feminism

My work draws on radical feminist abolitionist approaches to  the sexual abuse trades of pornography, prostitution and child sexual exploitation. While child sexual exploitation is illegal, at least on paper, it is a global problem that is exacerbated by legal porn and prostitution. The fact that sexual abuse industries are legal and permitted as normal should tell us something about how relational violence is normalised and reproduced. 

While I once supported porn and prostitution as “freedom” and part of the human story of liberation, these practices are symbols that human relationships are not free from property relations. 

To make sense of property relations I draw on Aristotle’s concept of ‘animate tools’,  a term which he used to describe slaves. This is similar to Karel Čapek’ original concept of the robot as a feudal term for obligatory work. Thus Aristotle’s slave ontology and Čapek’s robot are both about a mixed ontology between people and property. 

Prostitution, porn and child abuse permit the use of humans as property, to be used as animate tools.

While Aristotle celebrated this situation, the robot was created as a warning. 

In the early 2020s I worked on a project called the FATES (the Feminist Academy of Technology and Ethics) and together we produced the world’s first radical feminist approach to “sex” robots titled: Man-Made Woman: The Sexual Politics of Sex Dolls and Sex Robots (2023).  

I continue to support the work of those committed to the abolition of property relations including surrogacy and gender ideologies that harm women and girls and men and boys.

The Politics of Love

My new campaign The Politics of Love is a new project with a policy focus aimed at transforming human relationships with each other, non-human animals and the environment. This project brings together many years of research and activism. Rather than advocate from a negative position, “AGAINST” my work now is to create a new kind of politics.

In summary I have developed a political-ethical pronominal framework and argue that the way people relate to each other, their attachments with each other form the foundation for the political ethics and vice versa. Sexual abuse political systems could not thrive is there was no underlying attachment trauma. 

In summary the three pronouns are:

Egocentric I 

This is rooted in cartesian dualism and individualism. While all people have an I, when it is primarily egocentric there is only a first-person perspective that matters. This egocentrism gives rise to systems of violence and abuse as other people, nonhuman animals and the environment are regarded as property to be used, and resources to be extracted.

Undifferentiated We

This is rooted in the response to the egocentric I which came in the form of a we, an undifferentiated we. Humans have a we but it is fleeting and transitory, but in political formation its trajectory is to erase differences. The pronominal state can be summed up in the state “we are all connected”, and underpins globalist politics today. Some differences have a real ontological and empirical reality, such as adults and children, or males and females, so erasing categories does not erase the underpinning reality and can actually produce harms. This position is the third-person singular. 

I-you attachment

Is rooted in first-person second-person relatedness and mutuality. It is rooted in the dynamics that arise from vulnerability and strength and the ability of those with strength to hold their adult authority and not participate in abuse or relational violence. Only a way of being rooted in I-you attachment can produce the Politics of Love.