College of International Education

Mark Coeckelbergh (Int J Soc Robot 1:217–221, 2009) argues that robot ethics should investigate what interaction with robots can do to humans rather than focusing on the robot’s moral status. We should ask what robots do to our sociality and whether human–robot interaction can contribute to the human good and human flourishing. This paper extends Coeckelbergh’s call and investigate what it means to live with disembodied AI-powered agents. We address the following question: Can the human–AI interaction contribute to our moral development? We present an empirically informed philosophical analysis of how the AI personal assistant Siri changes its users’ way of life, based on the responses obtained from 20 semi-directive individual interviews with Siri users. We identify changes in the users’ social interaction associated with the adoption of Siri. These changes include: (1) the indirect effect of reducing opportunities of human interaction, (2) the second-order effect of diminished expectations toward each other in a community, and (3) the acquired preference to obtain hassle-free interaction with Siri over human interaction. We examine them in relation to concerns that are voiced in the current debates over the rise of AI, namely the suspicion that humans could become overly reliant on AI (Danaher 2019) and the worry that social AI could impede on moral development (Fröding and Peterson, Ethics Inf Technol 23:207–214, 2012; Li, Ethics Inf Technol 23:543–550, 2021). We analyze the ethical costs that come from these changes in light of virtue ethics and address potential objections along the way. We end by offering directions for thinking about how to live with AI personal assistant while preserving favorable conditions for moral development.

Friday November 22, 2019
Panel I: 2:00 PM - 3:45 PM
Panel II: 4:15 PM - 6:00 PM
Vancouver CC West Room 103 & 104

Chairs/Organizers:
Michelle Ho, National University of Singapore
Jenny Hoang, University of Southern California

“Trans Asia Pacific: Changing Queer Climates” is a two-part panel series that seeks to interrogate how “trans-” as a prefix shifts meanings of gender, sexuality, and the nation-state in Asia and the Pacific Islands. We foreground “Asia” and “Pacific Islands” as heterogeneous cultures, languages, and peoples engaged in global and diasporic migration flows and exchanges. Building on past anthropological works and scholarly collaborations on trans Asia Pacific (Martin and Ho 2006; Chiang 2012; Besnier and Alexeyeff 2014; Yue 2017; Aizura 2018; Chiang, Henry, and Leung 2018), this double panel asks the following questions: If “trans-” refers to “across,” “beyond,” and “through,” what gets left behind or crossed over when trans subjects travel and live across multiple locales? What limitations can “passing” suggest as genders and sexualities exist and proliferate in varied geographies, histories, climates, and temporalities? How might doing ethnographic research shape, enable, or challenge our understandings of “queer” and “trans” subjects?

Approaching these questions at the intersections of anthropology, queer studies, transgender studies, and transpacific studies, we intervene in the ongoing conversation by highlighting the lived experience of mobile trans subjects, materialization of inter- and diasporic Asian subjectivities, and mediation of trans embodied desires and practices. This two-part panel takes stock of what Trans Asia Pacific can be and where it could go. Comprising an interdisciplinary group of junior and established scholars, all eight presenters map diverse ethnographic engagements with trans across Samoa, Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, Indonesia, Hong Kong, South Korea, the Philippines, and the United States. Panel I approaches the question of Trans Asia Pacific through an analysis of migration histories, the nation-state, and the politics of LGBTQ activism, whereas Panel II enters the question of Trans Asia Pacific through an examination of gender and sexual embodiment and their media, digital, and affective circulations.

Panel I
Discussant: Martin Manalansan, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities

“Transgender and Transnational Lives of Transpinay Entertainers in Japan”
Tricia Okada
Tamagawa University

“Abundance and Reciprocal Recognition: Living Alongside Taiwanese and Taiwanese American Ts”
Jenny Hoang
University of Southern California

“Transnational LGBT Activism: Migrants’ Pride in Hong Kong”
Francisca Yuen-ki Lai
National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan

“‘Waiting for More Fish:’ Filipino Cannery Worker Histories in Astoria, Oregon and Contemporary Trans Filipinx (Auto-ethnographic) Photography”
Kale Fajardo
University of Minnesota, Twin Cities

Panel II
Discussant: Niko Besnier, Amsterdam University

“Samoan Queer Lives: TransPacific Gender and Sexuality”
Kalissa Alexeyeff
University of Melbourne

“Mediating Historical Continuity: Trans- Feminine Visibility in Indonesia, 1968”
Benjamin Hegarty
University of Melbourne

“Sissies, Butches, or Transsexuals: The Localization of Gender/Sexuality in Contemporary Thailand”
Dredge Byung'chu Kang-Nguyen
University of California San Diego

“Digital Trans Citizenship: Reconfiguring Gender, Nation, and Feminism in Japanese Online Media”
Michelle H. S. Ho
National University of Singapore