Advances in technology don't have to be progress for women. Technological fantasies and male-dominated scientific standards hidden in data and algorithms that discriminate, desire, and profit-driven are hindering the technological development of "common good."
From bronze iron to artificial intelligence, the development of technology has a profound impact on gender equality. In The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Engels discussed how weaving technology and metal processing in agricultural production technology in the period of clan tribes redistributed the role of social production, resulting in husbands occupying a more important position than wives in family production. The progress of the materials of production not only improved labor technology, but the demand for labor became the demand for "slaves". Under the influence of complex social chain reactions and combined factors, technological progress has divided society into different classes and brought about a revolution in the family, and the "bronze iron sword" has overthrown the matriarchy of clan tribes and implemented patriarchy - "leading to the historic failure of women's status".
Looking back at the history of technology's interaction with women, advances in technology are not necessarily women's advances. At our current historical stage, the rapid development of information technology has once again shown a certain "subversive" potential. Since the 1990s, as artificial intelligence Deep Blue, Watson, alpha go (Alpha Go) defeated humans in chess, quiz and Go, various life assistants such as Microsoft Xiaoice, Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri and other applications have entered human daily life. On the other hand, the biotechnology revolution such as artificial limbs, human embryo gene editing technology, assisted reproduction, and in vitro reproductive technology has experienced exploration and practice in all aspects, which has led people to the "post-human" of emerging life forms that are integrated with machines. Just as smart phones have become people's inseparable "social organs", people and artificial objects are more and more closely integrated, and technological products and new media not only change and shape our hearts and wills, but also have a profound impact on new social organizations and social forms. The future is here.
How new technologies such as artificial intelligence and virtual digital will affect the development of gender equality remain a highly controversial social topic. On the one hand, networks and new media provide women with new spaces for common actions and demands, and technology shows the potential to empower women in economic and cultural terms. Imaginations of fertility liberation such as "artificial wombs" have become technically possible. On the other hand, the genderization of technology has created various new forms of gender discrimination, and the gender digital divide reinforces the social differences between the sexes. As the technologies of life science, artificial intelligence, and virtual simulation continue to evolve and develop, they also bring about changes in social cognition and culture. The classic debate between whether science and technology will help us achieve gender equality or will reinforce the amplification of inequality continues.
The incubator of the Reproductive Medicine Center of Datangdu Hospital, the fourth medical school in Shaanxi Province, is like an artificial uterus, which stores sperm and eggs.
For now, the impact of scientific and technological progress on different groups is not homogeneous, and the Matthew effect has been further amplified when science and technology intervenes in the allocation of social resources. In the development of artificial intelligence, the sociophysics of algorithms and data is constituting a "social mirror" through the digitization of social representations, and "reality mining" not only reflects the gender injustice that originally existed in the current society; the distinction between men and women in the "algorithm division" also transforms gender issues into a digital arithmetic politics, strengthening value conflicts such as sexism. In the virtual, intelligent and digital "Cyber Brave New World", the imagination of science fiction and literature also reflects the gender desires of human beings and the hidden worries of gender crisis. We need to measure scientific standards by the scale of gender equality, restart the examination of scientific values from a gender perspective, and promote the ethics and governance of science and technology to achieve a more equal world with the help of science and technology.
Algorithmic discrimination and the gender politics of technology
Data is a product of society, and algorithms are an extension of the real world in the virtual world. From the day an algorithm was born, it was not neutral. Algorithmic Bias refers to the same prejudices and discrimination as humans when artificial intelligence algorithms collect, classify, generate and interpret data, including but not limited to discrimination by race, gender, age, employment, vulnerable groups, etc., and show differential treatment in the classification of consumption and behavior. Because of its universality, concealment and difficult to correct, algorithmic discrimination has become a stubborn disease of artificial intelligence. From the perspective of the reality of existing industries and commercial research and development, the production of software and hardware of artificial intelligence is still subordinate to the existing social order, almost copying or even strengthening the prejudices of human society.
Artificial intelligence has formed a "coded gaze" in data processing and decision-making. Previously, Google Translate had associated doctors with men and nurses with women— it learned the relevance of data from the human world, and thus became an extension of discrimination. In her research on the gender bias of news writing robots, the scholar Qi Linhun found that in sports reports written by AI news, female athletes will focus on describing external images or family identities as wives and mothers. In the fields of politics, energy, market economy, business technology and other fields, the AI selected male features much higher than women. Amazon's automated recruitment process recognizes that the vast majority of imported tech industry resumes are men, so according to the optimization principle, the score of female practitioners is low, forming a situation of discrimination against female candidates. And the high-paying positions pushed to women in Google ads are significantly lower than those of male users - the difference between men and women's salaries exists objectively as a data result, and the push of AI is more like embedded in the existing social structure, using data to continue to amplify this discrimination and injustice.
However, it is not easy to correct algorithmic bias by implementing algorithmic sexist governance. Only 10% of people currently working in the field of ARTIFICIAL are women, and AI engineers are still a male club. Artificial intelligence and technology products necessarily inherit the value orientations and biases of the programmers who write the code, the corrective AI trainers, and the primary databases or samples. Compared with gender discrimination from people, the implicit discrimination brought about by the black box of artificial intelligence algorithms is embedded in the algorithm recommendation and marketing rules in the new economic field, which is more difficult to identify. Secondly, in terms of technology, the design of algorithms involves quantitative target setting, and people, as consumers or target groups, their gender, class and race attributes have also been binaryally turned into labeling, sorting standards, artificial intelligence's commercial profit-seeking and service efficiency of differential treatment, itself also constitutes invisible discrimination, and then formed the well-known "big data killing".
In addition, the existing data of human society, as a result of social reality, not only inherits social injustice, but also suspects that its samples are overrepresented or magnified, thus showing the bias of technology. At present, ai in the business society only achieves basic intelligence at the functional level, and other aspects such as product design still need to cater to the "market", that is, customer bias. For example, the intelligence of the sweeping robot is reflected in the intelligent coverage of the area that can be cleaned by the residents, but the female voice is used in the non-intelligent function of voice broadcasting, in addition to the function, the technology is also a language, text and media carrier, and the gender stereotype is truly frozen and solidified in the sweeping robot and life assistant.
The digitization of people is not only the "data breadcrumbs" left by individual consumption trajectories and online living habits to allow merchants to make differential pricing to obtain more profits, or to let social managers carry out "refined social control", but also the social transformation of people themselves to further become objects in informatization. Human minds and behaviors are encoded to achieve dataization, and data in turn trains and reshapes human behavior and mind, a cyclical process that is constantly amplifying social value conflicts, including gender. And social programming and the virtualization of the real world necessarily introduce us from the question of "what is the real world" to the process of "how the virtual world came about". Gender inequality and gender discrimination in human society have also shown new forms in the process of "creating cognitive boundaries" due to the development of science and technology.
Take the various forms of "Room N" on the Internet and the pornographic dark web as examples of violations and sexual exploitation of children and women. For cyber sexual assault, the act of "entering" itself is no longer a physical violation, but a use of data. Cracked or pre-installed surveillance, hidden pinhole cameras, candid footage, replicable and disseminated data combine to form new forms of exploitation. In child or woman sexual abuse on the Internet and on social platforms, technology not only does not require the consent of child guardians and adult women, but also no longer requires their "presence". In new types of pornographic dark webs, nude loans, and even sexual crimes and attacks such as online violence, threatening and controlling people does not require actually tying their arms, and spreading the discursive images of information about privacy and the body that constitute sexual humiliation – this is how women lose their bodies in the face of information.
David Harvey pointed out in The Condition of Postmodernity that after the importance of reproducible information over durable goods, the importance of "ownership" will give way to "access". This shift also means a gradual shift in the importance of people from "presence/absence" to "mode/randomness". It means, first and foremost, that the "public/private" realm of man has been radically transformed—that privacy, a physically based private life, has become an information that can be "accessed." Room N, which constitutes privacy violations and online sexual assaults, has become a true portrayal of this transformation in real life. On this basis, the virtual synthesis technology of images can modify the face of any woman into a nude to form a "nude photo", and the manipulation of data threatens the social existence of living people. While these technical details are not enough to negate the full significance of technological developments, the moral interrogations and power constraints it experiences are far from sufficient.
The "patriarchal" imagination and the reality of patriarchy
Human civilization is based not only on reality, but also on fantasies driven by human desires. While science fiction and film are not technology in themselves, as wedges of scientific value, this category combines "scientific ideas" and endless imagination to begin telling stories about scientific theories. Science fiction works reflect the diverse desires and worries of people after science and technology enter the social situation, and further expand the social moral and cultural connotation of technology. Long before the development of artificial intelligence, various forms of text such as science fiction and movies were already building a new social picture - not only the changes in technology, but also a series of social changes such as production relations, interpersonal relations, and organizational forms. In a variety of scientific and technological imaginations, few works directly depict the Eden of gender equality due to the development of science and technology, but more construct the "father trotopia" that undertakes men's desires - the old gender order on the new scientific and technological splicing, robots are inevitably gendered, and they are involved in the existing gender politics of human beings in advance.
Westworld poster
Many well-known films and television works discuss the relationship between gender and technology by virtue of their position in entertainment culture. A series of well-known sci-fi films such as Mechanic, Blade Runner, Westworld, Black Mirror, and HerHER have invariably described future robots as human gender characters — rather than defaulting to "robots are genderless." In these works, the cyborg is often portrayed as an image full of lust, and the robot's body is a stage to show the "boundaries of identity", often with both blunt and implicit signs of class, ethnicity and cultural differences. It is true that sexual consciousness is an intuitive experience, and the ambiguous feelings and intimate relationships between humans and machines have become the most mainstream themes in the creation of such science fiction works. As a tortuous reflection of human gender desire, gender in the field of science and technology has naturally become a hierarchical category, a property that is considered to be constructed - the gender of electronic humans is an extension of the category of human gender.
Scholar Nicola D Ring et al. analyzed 710 film and television works between 1927 and 2014 and found that in works that describe human-machine intimacy, the human character is usually a man who is not good at interpersonal relationships. At the same time, robot companions tend to be female. Among them, non-fiction works often describe the intimate relationship between humans and robots from a sexual point of view, while science fiction and fiction works focus more on the emotions between humans and machines, and even involve cohabitation and reproduction and fertility. Although science fiction works are increasingly feminine and try to break gender stereotypes – the Terminator film series itself embodies this shift – in general, the representation of human-computer intimacy presented in film and television literature still conforms to the stereotypes of gender roles in human society after the stereotype of men and women, and the stereotypical stereotypes of heterosexual patterns are a kind of narrative baseline; and the story is always difficult to escape the attention to sexual and emotional intimacy. Advanced scientific theories full of futuristic technology are often stitched together with the gender culture of the old world, and the "electronic human body" is like the female body, the new bottle of old wine, full of imaginary gender order - which is full of the shadow of sexism.
For those science fiction works with progressive gender, pessimistic science fiction works always show a certain critical stance; and in positive works, how to use the development of science and technology to confirm the superiority of women's culture, reshape women's experience, and achieve social ideals that subvert patriarchy is still a self-talking and open question. Just as a series of works such as "Black Mirror" and "Westworld" show how the fetishism of science and technology, which has been promoted by capital society, alienates human self-perception, sets economic determinism and technological determinism as the premise of future development, and then triggers the crisis of interpersonal relations, moral ethics and social culture, and foreshadows that procedurally unjust and blindly expanding technology will encroach on human civilization. Although these fantasy worlds are far from coming, technological elements have begun to expand the boundaries of technological understanding. In these imaginatively constructed settings that virtually reset the whole of space-time, the fantasy scene of the "evil trotopia" is an allegory, and perhaps a prophecy. In the future, human society will inevitably face similar value conflicts and ethical dilemmas in the development of science and technology. How people can use technology's attempts to "negotiate" between morality, values, and taboos to adjust ethical relationships while advancing science and technology, and how scientific development can serve political empowerment and shape a new type of citizen relationship of good governance, is a series of unknowns of flow, consultation, and even struggle.
Gender imbalance in the ethics of technology
The development of science is inseparable from women, but science cannot be truly gender neutral. Although the first operator, the first operator, and the first performer were all women, and although the first computer was made with female contributions and the first programmer was also a woman, the gendered stance of masculine science is still the mainstream voice of the development of science and technology, and masculinity runs through the historical black box of technological development. In 1936, Virginia Woolf asserted that "science is not genderless." Science is a man, a father. At the end of the 1980s, a group of techno-feminists emerged to criticize the male hegemonic thinking and technological determinism in science and technology, and put forward an important scientific debate on whether technology can bring power to women and promote gender equality.
In the debate on the values of the philosophy of science, the principles of the traditional positivist method have been questioned. The background of scientific values, cognitive factors and social differences and technology shape each other, challenging the "technological determinism" of single cognition. H. Longino believes that the various social regulations or values that people usually believe in directly affect the formation of scientific evidence or the formulation of scientific evaluation standards. These social rules or values often contain a deep-seated sense of patriarchy. In the process of scientific development and legalization and rationalization, various assumptions dominated by men have played a leading role, which in turn has created an injustice and hindered the goal of "common good" in the service of scientific and technological development and services.
S. Sandra Harding Harding raises the important question: Is the progress of human society also the progress of women? Such questioning is not limited to gender, and on racial, class, and other criteria, we must go through the scientific value of the interrogation: which science will best improve the social welfare of the most vulnerable groups in their culture, not just serve the dominant groups? The introduction of pluralistic values, including gender, is important in the search for alternative scientific hypotheses and theories. Feminist philosophers of science also seek to transcend the traditional dualistic opposition in theory in order to penetrate and integrate with other disciplinary methods.
The current relationship between technological progress and women's liberation, while not yet experiencing the "darkest hour," is not at all optimistic. Unlike the cyber culture in which Haravi once pinned his hopes on, Judith. Squires) believes that cyberspace will recreate the old power relations, and the machine will combine to recreate the male hegemonic temperament. Wendy Faulkner argues that technological oppression has an isomorphic relationship with gender oppression, that there is a lasting symbolic link between masculinity and technology, and that there is also a distinct gender division of labor in technical practice. Austin-Smith, Brenda believes that the dissemination of information is accompanied by the exchange of power, there is bullying and sexism in cyberspace, and "the Internet is the web of patriarchal culture."
Admittedly, talking about these phenomena and gender issues is not about falling into the slippery slope of "technophobia" or simply optimistic or pessimistic positions of futurology. The ethical and value debate of technology is also so that morality can keep up with the rapid pace of scientific and technological development and exert people's constructive participation in the development of science and technology. Just this past January 31, the South China Morning Post has reported that Chinese scientists have created artificial intelligence nannies to care for babies in artificial wombs, and this progress comes from the Suzhou Institute of Biomedical Engineering and Technology. The researchers in the report believe that the technology of artificial uterus and AI surrogacy is no longer a problem, but legal and ethical challenges are the key to the popularization of this technology. Is this a "good" technique that liberates women from childbearing and relieves the pain of childbirth? Will it bring biological contamination to human beings and open the Pandora's box of life that we do not yet know? In the face of historical unknowns, how do we balance the risks and benefits of all parties? Especially in the scientific incident that occurred in 2018 when He Jiankui's gene editing babies, the compilation of human genes became a "disaster accident" for scientific and technological alienation. When political and capital interests drive technological development, and when the binding force of ethical and moral technological decisions is extremely limited, how can we avoid following the trend and reflecting on the trend of hindsight?
There is no doubt that the development of these sciences and technologies is closely related to the historical fate of women, population and birth control, and the reproduction methods of human beings. Realistic scientific and technological ethical choices are ultimately a social and cultural choice, and reflection, examination and restraint are particularly urgent at present. At the intersection of history and the future, the only thing we can foresee is that the ethics of technologies such as artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and life science and technology will remain "unfinished" for a long time, and the value debate of gender participation and the road to gender equality in science and technology are not ending.
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