In August 2021, Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced his idea for the Tesla Bot, a humanoid robot. The “bot” at the unveiling was, in reality, an unidentified person dressed in a black-and-white, full-body suit — white from the shoulders down and black from the neck up — who broke into dance during the presentation. Though no such robot yet exists, Musk reiterated last month that creating a prototype of the bot — which will be designed to complete “dangerous, repetitive and boring tasks” — is a major priority for Tesla in 2022.
In an interview with WIRED, Edward Jones-Imhotep, associate professor and director of the Institute for the History & Philosophy of Science & Technology, reveals how the Tesla bot intersects with the history of “Black androids,” mechanical humans created between the mid-18th and late 20th centuries to enact racist depictions of Black people.
The Tesla presentation, he says, “obviously evokes minstrelsy and blackface. And in doing so it also returns the Black android to some of its late 19th-century forms under the guise of progress.”
“One of the things we forget about ‘innovations,’” Jones-Imhotep says, “is they're cast as material or technological advancements, but they're often social or cultural regressions.”
Jones-Imhotep and his team are currently leading a research project to explore — and rewrite — the histories of Blackness and technology, specifically the “mythology that portrays technology as opposed to Blackness.”
Read the full WIRED article below.
In the news:
- The History—and Disturbing Resurrection—of Black Androids
WIRED | February 18, 2022