Monsters from the id

The technology is here to make our lives easier, but the old prejudices are emerging in turbo-charged form

- SALLY BLUNDELL

In Emily Perkins' play The Made, Alice, a 40-year-old AI engineer and sole parent, negotiates the uncharted waters of robot emotions. She has Nanny Ann, a frumpy, middle-aged humanoid bot charged with childcare and housework.

And she has Arie, a new robot built on the chassis of a former sexbot. When Alice tries to infuse her robots with emotion, Nanny Ann gains the full gamut of emotional autonomy. As Perkins says, "She has a lot of fury."

But Arie's sexbot programming limits her emotional capacity to an unflagging happiness.

Premiered by the Auckland Theatre Company last year, The Made is funny, warm-hearted and chaotic, but it also casts a hard light on the stereotypes that shape the artificial intelligence industry.

"I wanted to consider why we have not necessarily a lack of imagination, but a narrow band of imagination when it comes to what we are making AI look like and sound like and do," says Perkins. "Falling into those stereotypes is a huge problem."

Australian journalist Tracey Spicer, NSW Premier's 2019 Woman of the Year for her work in the #MeToo movement and a recipient of an Order of Australia gong, was blindsided by that problem, too. In 2016, her then 11-year-old son announced he wanted a robot slave. It was 7.45am and her son had just seen South Park's "toon hoon" Cartman bully and harass home robot Amazon Alexa.

So began Spicer's seven-year investigation into the gender, racial, age-based and sexual biases shaping the development and use of artificial intelligence.

As she says from her home in Sydney, "It is like when you see something and the scales fall from your eyes and you can't stop seeing it everywhere around you."