I met Tacitus & Attar tonight. (Or, more pompously, ‘on robots, naming, and slavery’).
On and off for a few years, ever since I worked for a short time as something like a consultant-researcher at the weird confluence of information technology and philosophy, I have been thinking about the problem of robotics and its relationship to servitude in Euro-American cultures (things probably work differently in Japan, for instance). Is it possible for designers of robots, or those who relate to them more generally, to think of them outside the terrible binary of slave/master (i.e. people want an electronic slave, but fear robots will become their electronic masters)?
I’ve never pursued this very far, with other projects always being more pressing, but the question of naming ought to be part of any serious enquiry into the subject. We name our children and our pets, so those are possible points of comparison; but one constant and near-universal in the history of slavery is the renaming of enslaved people by their owners, part of the “natal alienation” the Jamaican-American sociologist Orlando Patterson described as one of the characteristic features of slavery in his now classic work Slavery and Social Death from 1982. As he and many others have observed, sometimes those names could be — from the masters’ or mistresses’ perspective — humorous, “cute” little diminutives.
Let me give just one example related to my own area of research. In the 10th century AD, a formerly enslaved eunuch called Kāfūr ended up being the effective ruler of Egypt for a while. Kāfūr was dark-skinned, or aswad i.e. “black” in Arabic (this kind of distinction long predating European Christians’ own skin-colour schemes); al-Mutanabbī, widely and long recognized as one of the greatest Arabic poets, wrote a hideous piece of invective reviling his blackness after failing to secure his patronage. Kāfūr means “camphor”, which is white. As the British satirical magazine Private Eye used to write, “geddit”? But no doubt some former owner and his friends found it funny.
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This post was originally meant to be a frivolous comment on the fact that as I was out walking this evening, I came across several food delivery robots belonging to an entity called Serve Robotics (the clue’s in the name…) Unlike the rival set of robots branded ‘Coco’, these robots all have names that appear on their little screens and on their side [see photos]. Wandering around, my kids and I have noticed a wide variety of names, a diversity I suspect is the result of a desire on the part of whoever runs this operation to be culturally sensitive — both because the names are drawn from a range of naming traditions, and because they don’t seem to have chosen anything that might be deemed offensive. I’ve come across a couple of robots with neutral-sounding Iranian-Persian names, for example, Afruz (a female name with no religious connotations) being one of them, but I’m confident I’m not going to encounter a Mohammad, a Hoseyn, or a Fatemeh.
Today, after Nicholas and Starlet, I was surprised to find Tacitus, the 1st/2nd century AD Roman historian. (Forty minutes or so later I remembered there had been an Emperor Tacitus, who ruled for a few months in 275–6, but I’m sure it’s the historian that the namers had in mind). Regretting not having brought my phone with me, I kept walking when a few metres on I encountered Attar — the 12th/13th century AD mystic and poet from Nishapur in Iran.
As it happened, an older lady was speaking loudly in Persian in the apartment next to where Attar and I were, and I felt like politely inviting her to come and meet the famous poet. “Khanom, tashreef biyareen, Attar injast!” [Madam, would you mind coming here, Attar’s here!] Instead, I went home and brought my phone.
What did these two robots, parked (?) or resting (?) a few yards apart say to one another, I wondered? Did they exchange writing tips? (I said this post was intended to be frivolous). Or did they inhabit spiritual universes so different that all they had to say to one another was to argue about whether the robot Cesar up the road should really be ‘Caesar’ (Latin) or ‘Qeysar’ (Persian)? Did they sympathize with each other on once having being men of leisure and importance, certainly able to exploit enslaved labour themselves, now reduced to being ‘on duty’ in the form of a plastic and metal wheeled box? Or am I missing the point, and is the ‘cuteness’ here (these boxes come with two big round eyes on the front) to be understood as more childlike? Companion animal-like? Or even sui generis?
