Women Discuss the Female Side of Robotics
Photo: Robb Chohen Photography & Video.
Women — and some men — showed up for table sessions Wednesday afternoon that offered 13 different topics for discussion, including ones on diversity, promoting STEM for girls, investing and marketing in unmanned systems and more.
In “Are robots too male?” Alyssa Simpson, a senior offering manager with IBM Watson, posed the question: What are robots supposed to act like?
Her team finds itself frequently having to correct the executive team for anthropomorphizing Watson.
One attendee made the point that service-oriented robots are often given female voices. Think Apple’s Siri or Amazon Echo’s Alexa, whereas the genius robots, the big-data intelligencers are assigned male voices. Think Atlas from Boston Dynamics. “He’s highly capable and not an assistant,” she said.
