Social Robot?

smashr writes "Researchers are currently putting the finishing touches on robots that will be attending the AAAI (American Association for Artificial Intelligence) conference this year as part of the AAAI robot challenge. In addition to robots wearing tuxedos and serving drinks, several robots designed to actually register themselves will be participating in the conference. One such robot is GRACE, being built by Carnegie Mellon University and the Naval Research Lab (among others). GRACE features a digital face and speech recognition to interact with people attending the conference. (She even runs Linux!) Her goal is to register for the conference, give a speech and answer questions. Stories at: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, CNN.com, and USA Today."

Comments

Re:The creator are sexists

[sielwolf]

The Register had a good article on pronoun usage.

In English the masculine is used in gender-neutral cases where the gender cannot be specified before hand ("The officer should have his standard equipment present").

The feminine is used in cases of abstract personification ("The United States has her hands full") of a concept or an object (Freedom or automobiles).

Much like a car, to give it "personality" would move it from the first case to the second. Thus when you give a generic machine a specific voice, it is (usually) female).

But, as with all usage, it is up to the user. There is a strong push for gender neutral language in most things. The problem is that in cases that are purely up to personal taste, these rules apply.

So you can't tell someone to not make their robot feminine. But you can tell someone to make their manual not masculine.

And you seem to think their purpose was purely political (ie that there was a certain quota that needed to be maintained so they added a female robot to offset the male engineers). I really think it is much simplier than that.