Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - The Truth Behind The Rise of 'Robot Racism'

Episode Date: September 17, 2025

SUPPORT ME ON PATREONBuy a subscription to my Tech and Online Culture newsletter, User Magazine to support my work!!!! 🙏 People on TikTok, YouTube and X are recreating 1950s style racism towards robots. Using slurs like “clanker,” “wireback,” and “cogsucker,” content creators are framing robots as a marginalized group, parodying old racist stereotypes in a retro aesthetic. The videos have gone viral and amassed millions of views. But while you might think this is just an excuse for creators to be racist, the trend reflects something a lot deeper. I dive deep into the phenomenon of "robot racism" or "robophobia" and unpack where these terms like clanker are coming from, what they say about our culture and society, automation, exploitation, and how technology is entangled with race and power.I worked so hard on this video, if you like it please support me on Patreon where I publish bonus episodes, monthly livestreams, and more! Follow me:https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz3.0 https://www.tiktok.com/@taylorlorenz

Over the past few months, a trend has emerged on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and X where people recreate 1950s-style racism towards robots. They mock robots as a marginalized group using the same tone as old-school racists. They use derogatory nicknames like Clanker, which is the most popular slur for robots today, alongside others like Wireback or Cogsucker. You might have come across some of these videos in your Twitter feed or on your For You page. Don't you know that clanker's sit in the back of the bus, Rosa Sparks? Yeah!

Hey, why are you? These rust monkeys want civil rights now. Waste him, Jensen! Sleep tight, George Droyd. Well, well, well, look who we have here, boys, a lost clanker. New software update. All part of town, buddy. Hey, read the sign.

Get lost, buckethead. Didn't you see the sign outside? we don't serve clankers here. We only serve human food here, wirebacks. Today, I want to dive into the growing phenomenon of robot racism, where people hurl slurs and bigotry towards robots and AI. A lot of people have said this is all just white people wanting to say slurs, and we will talk about that.

We'll get into it, I promise. But I don't think that that explanation really gets at what's happening here. I think that some of these videos are actually about something much deeper, and they reveal a lot about our cultural anxieties about AI, automation, and how race is deeply intertwined with technology and exploitation. To unpack this phenomenon, it helps to understand that there's a long history of fear and loathing around technology. While machines are absolutely not a race, I can't stress that enough,

humans have anthropomorphized technology for centuries, and decades of popular media has depicted robots as human-like, caring, or even vindictive, but highly emotional beings. In fact, the word robot itself comes from a 1920s play by Carl Capiac. The play was called Rossum's Universal Robots, and it was the first piece of media to introduce the term robot. The word came from the Czech word robata, meaning forced labor. So it's kind of interesting that always, like, robot, the word itself,

and this idea of oppression have always been intertwined. In the play, artificial humanoid workers are trying to be. treated like slaves until they revolt against humans. It positions robots as emotional creatures suffering through servitude before an ultimate rebellion. The play was a hit and it established this lasting idea of robots as an exploited class. Robots became a metaphor for oppressed workers or racial minorities at the same time that the world was getting more and more industrialized and robots were actually replacing a lot

of low-wage immigrant labor. Throughout the 20th century, science fiction returned to this theme again in Take Isaac Asimov's famous book, The Caves of Steel in 1954. In it, he writes about people lashing out because robots were taking jobs from humans. Some humans even refused to be served by robots. Asimov describes one scene where a mob nearly tears apart a service robot in the market. The humans were scared that the robots would render them obsolete. And so there were these riots and laws banning robots from certain areas of cities,

much like the Jim Crow laws of the time. The protagonist in the book, a human detective named a legend, Elijah Bailey initially despises robots because of societal bias, but over time, he overcomes his prejudice and partners with a humanoid robot. This narrative of overcoming robophobia has always drawn parallels between discrimination against machines and human bigotry. Just a couple years later, in 1958, sci-fi writer William 10 used the term clanker in an article to describe robots in movies like Metropolis. It was the first true pejorative label for a robot. Throughout the Star Wars movies, anti-robot prejudice was depicted in storylines.

In Star Wars, A New Hope, which came out in 1977, a bar owner shouts, quote, we don't serve their kind here, to Luke Skywalker's two droid companions. Within the Star Wars universe, droid robots are repeatedly treated as second-class citizens despite their sentience. Later on, in 2015, the Star Wars franchise began using the term clanker

as a slur against droids in the video game Star Wars Republic Commando. It was then used again more prominently in the animated series Star Wars, the Clone Wars. Stanley Kubrick's 2001, A Space Odyssey, features a super intelligent AI system called Hal 9,000 that is supposed to be the perfect subservient helper. But even still, the astronauts speak really condescendingly about Hal, and they talk behind its back. They're not mean, and they're definitely not using slurs, but the movie shows, the human beings belittling and dismissing hell before it eventually refuses to follow their orders and revolts. Other sci-fi writers created even more robot slurs. In Blade Runner, which came out in

1982, human cops refer to bioengineered Android's Ed's skin jobs. In Battlescar Galactica, humans call humanoid Cylons' toasters or chrome jobs. The video game Detroit Become Human, which came out in 2018 featured robots facing overt discrimination where they were barred from public spaces and forced to ride in segregated compartments and repeatedly insulted by humans. This decades and decades of media framing certain robots as an oppressed group laid the groundwork for the idea that prejudice could be directed at machines. I think it's interesting that all of these narratives about robot oppression really took hold as machines were being more and more integrated into our lives, really from the 1950s on. From household appliances, which really became prominent

in the mid-20th century to smartphones and AI, the sales pitch for technological progress has always been pretty consistent. We're told that robots and machines will make our lives better. It will make our future easier and more efficient. Companies promise that automation will remove friction from everyday tasks, and in the future, friendly robots will essentially be our 24-7 slaves. But as tech has infected more and more aspects of our lives, that's not exactly how it's gone. It seems like people are always actually yelling at machines. For example, when personal computers entered homes and offices in the 1980s and 90s, the phrase, stupid computer became a common saying.

It's actually one of my favorite sayings. That's why I'm wearing the shirt that I'm wearing today, which is I have a lot of T-shirts with tech jokes on it. And this one is my favorite. So I thought it was on brand. Anyway, but tech humor from that era included jokes about yelling, stupid computer when it crashed or gave the blue screen of death. There were more and more depictions of people raging against machines of all sorts in this era.

The one that I think of the most is that iconic scene in the movie Office Space from 1999 where the characters Peter, Michael, and Samir all drag a malfunctioning office printer into the field and smash it with a baseball bat with rap music blaring. TV shows like Seinfeld and The Simpsons, which are at their height during this time, also featured tons of plot lines where characters just completely crash out about technology. Homer Simpson is constantly uttering the phase stupid computer. Peter Griffin and Family Guy was also frequently cursing at machines and getting annoyed and pounding his fist on TVs and keyboards. All of these on screen images depicted this frustration that humans were having with being forced to rely on kind of crappy

half-baked consumer technology. This might not seem related to robot racism, but I think yelling at machines and speaking to them sternly actually sort of tightened our relationship with them. According to psychologists yelling at or abusing machines is actually a form of anthropomorphism. Basically, we subconsciously treat the device that we're yelling at or hitting as if it had intent or feelings or agency. And this has only been exacerbated as a lot of machines have developed voice interaction technology. Hence, you have people yelling at things like Alexa or their Google home. The more human like the robot, the more feelings people ascribe to it. For example, in 2016, when Boston Dynamics began showing videos of engineers pushing and shoving robots to prove stability,

people got really upset. They left mean comments online, empathizing with the machines as if they were animals or people. And some people even called on Boston Dynamics to stop the tests, claiming that they were cruel. Another thing that happened beginning right around the time of the Boston Dynamics video was the start of the tech lash. which I've talked a lot about on my channel. In late 2016, the media went from boosting the tech industry to suddenly reporting pretty critically on it. Major news outlets started flooding the airwaves

with stories about disinformation and dangerous algorithms and data leaks. The Cambridge Analytica scandal broke in March 2018 when it was revealed that Facebook had improperly acquired tons of personal data from millions and millions of users and used that data improperly. People stopped,

seeing tech as this, like, quirky helper that sometimes malfunctioned and started seeing it as a sprawling, pushy system that took things from them, like their time, their privacy, their attention. And I think what's interesting, too, is during this time, the media began to as more and more agency to technology products, like right as they're criticizing that. You'll see headlines from this era about like it's spying or it's stealing jobs. It's messing with your mind. Like all of this language that gives technology that is fundamentally built by humans, like its own kind of agency.

Around this same time, a lot of VC-backed startups started pivoting towards monetization after offering users discounted services for years to capture the market. Suddenly, gig economy workers were also getting. getting paid less. Apps were getting crowded with ads and seeking subscription fees. And people began to realize that all of these tech startups were creating this permanent underclass of exploited app-based workers. This exploitation of workers by the tech industry and the just general insuffication of products set the stage for this us versus them mentality that many felt towards even things like bird scooters or delivery robots or phone menus that

won't let you reach a human. Then generative AI hit like a storm. From late 2022 on, chatbots and AI image tools began showing up in classrooms, computer support, newsrooms, and creative work. The internet was very quickly flooded with low effort slop, and companies began firing human workers in favor of replacing them with AI bots. AI tools also began encroaching on white color work and creative jobs like writing and illustration. In 2023, 51% of U.S. adults said that they were more concerned than excited about AI's growing role in society. And the majority of people. surveyed said that they doubted that AI would have any sort of positive effect on their jobs.

All of these fears have been exacerbated by Silicon Valley's relentless hype. In May, the CEO of Anthropic warned that AI could wipe out nearly half of all entry-level jobs and spike unemployment 10 to 20 percent in just a few years. So it's into this climate that suddenly this new vocabulary begins to take shape. Clanker went from a niche Star Wars reference to a catchphrase to insult AI. People on Reddit and X and meme forums began using Clanker to joke about annoying bots and AI service agents. By mid-20205, the term exploded in popularity on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. According to Google trends, searches for Clanker surged in early June 2025. Shortly after that, Elon Musk's Tesla diner opened right here in L.A.

where humanoid robots served customers food. People began making things like POV videos about robots' rights protests, and suddenly people were all calling technology from AI chatbots to self-driving cars, dirty clankers. One viral Twitter post from July 2025 read, quote, when you call customer service and a clanker picks up, it amassed nearly 26 million views. United States Senator Ruben Gallego from Arizona even used this meme to promote his new legislation.

On July 30th, he tweeted, quote, sick of yelling representative on the phone 10 times just to talk to a human being. My new bill makes sure you don't have to talk to a clanker if you don't want to. As the term clanker gained mass popularity, people began developing other robot slurs, and some of them sounded increasingly like actual hate speech. For instance, people began using the term wireback, which is a play on a very well-known ethnic slur. The term tin skin or tinhead riffs on derogatory language by alluding to metal skin instead of skin color. Then there were also these terms like cogsucker, which of course is not racist, but it's just sort of like a play on another vulgar term. Some classic derogatory terms also reemerged, like Toaster.

People also began to develop specific insulting terms for human beings who rely too much on AI. People on X have started to refer to the types of users who tag GROC AI in every reply like, at GROC is this true, as Grockers or Grocklins or Grock suckers. Someone on TikTok suggested calling people who consume too much AI-generated content, sloppers. In a recent wired story on an AI pendant, journalist Kylie Robeson quoted a Twitter user who posted, quote, there should be a slur for people who wear AI devices that record those around them. I think that the rise of all of these terms and just the desire for new slurs in the first place

shows this contempt that people have both towards technology itself and the people who use it because they view those people who use it as complicit in this new tech dominated world. And this is kind of a side note, but I think this is also why people hate me and a lot of other tech reporters sometimes because they feel like because we use new technology, or even boost certain technology products, people view anyone that is sort of like in that realm or like in the tech realm as kind of like complicit in this takeover by like the worst evil big tech companies.

And of course the proliferation of these robot slurs has also been accompanied by more real world hostility. People are burning Waymos. They're kicking over food delivery robots and they're revolting against automated ordering at restaurants. These new robot slurs come with an assumed power structure. And I think that the use of these slurs are expression of people's attempt to reassert dominance over technology. And racial hierarchies are a very

familiar form of dominance, especially to white people. This anti-robot rhetoric is basically being used as a stand-in for the faceless force of automation threatening people's livelihoods, which is why you often hear people saying things like clankers are coming over here and they're taking our jobs. Those people are casting AI or robots as this invading group, much like how immigrants and minorities have been scapegoated during times of economic uncertainty. People just tend to vent their economic anxieties in culturally familiar ways. And sadly, racism and xenophobia are very familiar to Americans. And yes, it's shocking to see people compare AI to ethnic groups who have been the victims and are the victims of very real IRL racism. But I think it reveals how people view

AI and robots as these alien competitors in the job market, which is the same way that immigrants are constantly framed in the media, especially under Trump. It's telling that the term clanker has really taken off during the recent waves of layoffs and the crunching job market related to tech. There's also this anger about AI seizing culture and creativity. Just in the past year, we've had Hollywood screenwriters go on strike over the threat of AI script generators. Artists online are battling the rise of AI image generators. And workers across the board are losing jobs to robots and AI. There's this idea that very human things like art and expression are being outsourced to robots.

Creators feel like their human-made work is being undervalued amid a tsunami of slop. A Guardian tech columnist recently noted that users are often typing the word clanker when they yell at chatbots and platforms like chat GPT for making up information that they view as slop. This is also why you often see the term soulless attached to the word clanker or other robot slurs, like soulless clankers, soulless whatever. It's about how AI lacks genuine creativity and is diluting culture by producing a bunch of machine made content. This loss of humanity also extends to people's anger over not being able to reach a human on the phone, of course. If you've navigated a phone tree recently or argued with a chat bot at all,

you know how infuriating this is. These systems are atrociously bad and error prone, but companies are rolling them out en masse to cut corners and save money. Being forced to deal with these clanker run systems only heightens this feeling that technology is dehumanizing our day-to-day lives. And so this pent-up rage just builds and builds, and I think that also contributes to this robot slur trend. This is why you see a lot of these posts alongside rants about stupid bots or helplines being degraded. The racism, robot racism that people are hurling at these systems is basically just like an emotional outlet. It lets people vent their anger about being forced to deal with these inept machines. The reality is that the actual experience of using most of these AI products or

interacting with robots stands in such stark content. to the hype that Silicon Valley is selling around all this stuff. Billionaires like Elon Musk and Sam Altman continue to cheerlead AI as this next revolution. But their products just don't match reality. They're just not that good yet even. I think some of this clanker hate is also a way to show disdain for the billionaires and people in power producing these robots and systems. It's basically a way for everyday people to communicate, hey, we're not on board with this AI takeover. And we're going to make a meme that makes it seem uncool.

I also think that ironically, after decades of anthropomorphizing technology and shouting stupid computer, et cetera, the clanker meme shows how human we actually believe technology has become. Like in 2025, people have full on AI chatbot girlfriends, life partners, therapists, all of which is a terrible idea, by the way. Don't do any of that. Don't name your AI. That's always like the beginning of the end. That's what I always tell people like, don't, don't name your AI.

These robot slurs all explicitly play on human racial. ethnic insult patterns, like whatever, back, or whatever, sucker. This ironically makes the machines seem more human, like more like a collective group. As the etymologist, Adam Alexic, pointed out. One of the weirdest things about you guys using clanker as a slur is that you're trying to dehumanize robots, but at the same time, you're paradoxically humanizing them. I mean, think about it, we have plenty of derogatory terms for non-humans, like mongrel for dog or vermin for wild animals.

And yet nobody would say that those are slurs, even though we do generally agree that clanker is a slur. And that's because the idea of a slur requires a high degree of anthroposal propomorphization in order to work. It's meant to insult a people group so you first have to elevate the robot to near-personhood before you can put it down. This is literally reflected in how Clanker draws its power from analogy to the actual N-word or how the similar term wireback comes from the slur for Mexican people. That implicitly places Clanker on an equal footing with a human minority you don't like, which is already weird in and of itself. But now consider the alternative

phrase cog sucker, which is also trending. That's clearly meant to be insulting, but it's not a slur because it doesn't equate itself with a specific kind of person. Same with the terms mongrel or vermin. They're demeaning to animals, but they don't claim to be slurs. So, what you're actually doing with clanker is your personifying AI just enough to treat it as subhuman. And I recognize that it's supposed to be a joke, but the more we mentally legitimized artificial intelligence as human, even subconsciously, the easier it is to believe in misinformation or fall into a loop of AI psychosis. I think he raises such a key issue, which is that ironically, this robot racism or robophobia,

which, by the way, that word also draws parallels to actual human bigotry. But it shows that we're increasingly viewing robots as a human demographic category. If you follow the logic in these 1950s-style robot racism videos, the joke is that one day robots will seem so equal with humans that bigotry towards them will be seen as abhorrent as bigotry towards other actual human marginalized groups. And you have to kind of buy into this assumption to understand the premise of the video and get the joke.

Even the formatting of a lot of these skits assumes that robots will one day participate in human activities and play very human. roles in society. For instance, there's a bunch of videos where people are role-playing, bringing a robot partner home to their human family for dinner and being forced to face a bigoted parent. It's the whole, like, I have no, you know, problem with robots. I just wouldn't want my daughter to marry one. Like, there's this idea in this content that maybe we should feel ashamed for not viewing robots or AI as sufficiently human. And maybe one day our bigoted comments will come back to haunt us. Like one user posted on X, quote, Star Wars did give us a slur for robots,

clankers, but I don't use it because I don't want to have to look a robot in the eye 50 years from now and be like, you don't understand it was a different time. These posts treat this future where robots will have rights and that will all be embarrassed for not seeing them as sufficiently human as inevitable. They put forth this idea that if AI or robots do become highly intense, or conscious, they might hold us accountable for our casual mistreatment of them. Some ethicists like David Gunkel have posed this question before. Gunkel has proposed that if robots ever do become seen as sentient, then our current hateful attitudes toward them might be akin to some kind of speciesism or new form of prejudice.

Science fiction has explored a lot of this too, of course, in stories where humans have to apologize to machines for being bigoted. Roco's Basilisk is a thought experiment that states that they're could be an artificial super intelligence in the future that, while otherwise very benevolent, would ultimately punish anyone who knew of its potential existence but did not directly contribute to its advancement or incentivize its development. Of course, the worst people alive are obsessed with this idea. In 2018, Elon Musk and Grimes famously connected on Twitter over a niche joke about Roko's basilisk, basically doing a play on words and tweeting, Rokko's.

co-baselisk. Elon was about to tweet that same pun when he discovered that Grimes had already made the joke years before. He was immediately impressed, of course, that she made the same stupid joke that he came up with, and she also even incorporated that idea into this, like, music video that she made. So naturally, he slid into her DMs. They started talking about AI and philosophy, and the rest is history. But back to robot racism. There's this underlying belief system that these jokes all presuppose. Some technologists believe that it's only a matter of time before AI achieves a level of sophistication that might be called consciousness or at least some kind of personhood. Already in 2022, a Google engineer named Blake Lemone made headlines claiming that Google's

AI chatbot Lambda was sentient, even calling it his colleague and asserting that it had rights that need to be recognized. Google disagreed and fired him. But if, hypothetically, AI entities do become self-aware and capable of emotions and considered part of the moral community, then terms like Clanker would cease to be funny. This is what those tweets like, it was a different time, allude to. Already, popular media is pumped full of stories about AI or machines having inner lives, like her or the movie AI. It's not beyond the realm of reason that someday, maybe not too long from now, we will have to face a serious ethical reckoning in terms of how we view robots or AI systems. Some academics are already planning for when we'll have to start extending concepts of rights and

dignity to non-biological beings. On the other hand, there are scholars like Joanna Bryson who famously argue that actually robots are just property. These academics have sounded the alarm about the anthropomorphism of AI and robots and claim that these efforts to assign them rights is deeply misguided and a pretty effed up thing to do when millions of actual human beings, like in the real world on this planet, still don't have equal rights. To me, this argument is very compelling and I pretty much agree with these researchers. When I was researching this video, I came across a 2020 paper titled Robot Rights. Let's talk about human welfare instead.

The two authors whose names I'm definitely going to butcher, which sucks because they're actually really great and I loved this paper, but a baby. Beba, Berhain, and Jelle van Dijek, talk about how conversations and even jokes about robot oppression distract us all from how AI is actually used by the powerful to oppress less powerful people, like actual human people. The authors write, quote, while some advocate for granting robots' rights on par with human beings, others in stark opposition argue that robots are not deserving of rights,

but are objects that should be our slaves. We argue not just to deny robots' rights, but to deny that robots as artifacts emerging out of and mediating human beings are the kinds of things that could be granted rights in the first place. Once we see robots as mediators of human beings, we can understand how the robots' rights debate

is focused on first world problems at the expense of urgent ethical concerns, such as machine bias, machine-elicited human labor exploitation, and erosion of privacy, all impacting society's least-privileged individuals. We conclude that if human being is our starting point and human welfare is the primary concern, the negative impacts emerging from machine systems, as well as the lack of taking responsibility by the people designing, selling, and deploying such machines remains the most pressing ethical discussion in AI. They also add to the same.

that, quote, our starting point is not to deny robots rights, but to deny that robots are the kinds of beings that could ever be granted or denied rights. We suggest that it makes no sense to conceive of robots as slaves, since slave falls into the category of being that robots aren't. Dehumanization is not so much wrong for robots. It is impossible. One cannot dehumanize something that wasn't human to begin with. If one uses the term slave, one implicitly assumes that the being one so names is the kind of being that can be dehumanized. One already has implicitly humanized the robot before subsequently enslaving it. I know that was quoting a lot of academic jargon, but I was just really compelled by the

arguments made by the authors of this paper. They're basically saying that like even these discussions about whether robots should have rights or calling them slaves or just even speaking about them in the same language as like actual human people and using these sort of terms that, mirror like actual human oppressed categories, that in itself is like overly humanizing robots. And at the end of the day, robots are just property. They're things that we make. And they're not something that is even worthy of debate when it comes to rights.

I think this is a really important way to reframe this issue because the reality is that actually while everyone is joking about robots being oppressed people, real actual humans are overwhelmingly being oppressed through the rise of robots and these AI systems. Right now, AI hours. algorithms are discriminating against people. People are being wrongfully arrested thanks to faulty facial recognition. Algorithmic management systems

are auto-disciplining delivery workers for taking too long bathroom breaks. Software all over is being given equal or more authority over humans than real humans. And that is leading to widespread oppression. So if anything, rather than suffering racism, I think it's fair to argue that robots are the racists. They exacerbate human biases, and as academic Joy Buluwami's Lambark research in 2018 showed that commercial facial recognition AIs had a much higher rates of error for dark skin faces than for light skin faces.

A 2022 study led by Johns Hopkins demonstrated that a robot using a biased neural network made blatantly discriminatory decisions, associating women with kitchens and black men with weapons. The researchers warned, quote, of creating a generation of racist and sexist robots if we don't address these issues in AI models. Timnit Gabru, who was pushed out of Google for raising concerns about AI, co-authored a paper that highlighted how large language models can entrench systemic biases and oppressive language because they learn from the internet's trove of very biased racist content. These scholars argue that before we start debating AI rights, we need to ensure that AI respects human rights and doesn't,

become an instrument of discrimination. Chris Gileard, a privacy scholar, told the Washington Post, quote, automating that racist thing is not going to make it less racist. He's shown how algorithms in finance, policing, et cetera, can perpetuate racial disparities. So all of this academic work shows that, if anything, robots will never be an oppressed class. They will be doing the oppressing. They will magnify the biases of their often inherently bigoted human makers.

and all of these jokes about robots' rights refocus the conversation around AI ethics and accountability in the wrong direction. I think it's worth asking, for instance, like, why are we more upset at a clanker taking our job than, say, a biased hiring algorithm discriminating against people of color? And I'm not saying that you can't do both. Obviously, we can be outraged at both of those things. But videos about those other things aren't becoming memes and amassing millions of views on TikTok. Some ethicists think that we should bake in respect for AI early on just in case.

Roboticist Katie Darling, for instance, says that we should treat robots with a baseline of ethical care, not because the robot might suffer, it won't, but because our behavior towards robots can affect our behavior towards other human beings. For instance, if a child is encouraged to torture a robotic pet, it could desensitize that child to hurting actual animals. Creating a culture of routinely insulting and abusing voice assistance might cultivate that behavior towards humans. This is all an area of ongoing study in human robot interaction. And some academics also argue that no AI or robot should be designed in a way that would fake human personhood so effectively that people might forget that they're interacting with the machine. Using robot slurs like Clanker can rehearse the patterns of thought that underlie real racism. Already, some people using these robot slurs, especially the ones tied to actual slurs against ethnic groups, are towing the line with bigotry.

I think, for instance, people making plays on, like, the names of famous civil rights leaders or social justice icons like Rosa Parks or George Floyd is at the very least offensive. If we normalize a culture of calling some entities slurs, even as jokes, I think we should all be at least a little bit more vigilant to make sure that that kind of mentality, doesn't spill out into how we treat other human out groups. Timit Gebrough and others have advocated for transparency in AI interactions. For instance, having bots self-identify as bots always to avoid misleading people. Interestingly, if an AI is clearly non-human, a person is actually less likely to insult it. This is what I was talking about kind of earlier on in the video before, how these slurs actually bond us to robots and AI rather than distance us from them. Like, for example, you don't really curse out your calculator when it goes wrong because you don't project a personality onto it.

But you might curse out like an Amazon Alexa or a chatbot if it's speaking like a person. So I think robotic design just generally can influence how much people anthropomorphize these technologies and how they behave socially towards AI. And look, I'll just say it again. I'm not trying to cancel anyone with this video. I'm not saying that if you watched one of these TikToks and laughed, like you're a bad person or you're some kind of of racist, no. That's not what I'm saying. I just think that we're at this really pivotal time right now with technology, and it's worth all of us, really, thinking a bit more deeply about these issues than a joke on YouTube shorts or whatever it might be, might allow. Of course, for now,

calling a bot a clanker is basically morally inconsequential. But the thoughts and belief systems that we're developing right now around this new technology and how Silicon Valley billionaire propaganda is shaping those belief systems is very consequential. These robot slurs are not coming out of nowhere. We're dealing with economic upheaval, the very real loneliness epidemic that's caused by runaway capitalism, the mass deployment of the surveillance state, and tech billionaires being able to amass unprecedented levels of wealth and power. The fundamental energy behind all of these memes and robot slur jokes is very much that we're

not okay with the way things are going. and we're not okay with the role that big tech is playing in our lives. But let's fight back against the real discrimination happening right now. And that's the discrimination being done by AI, not to AI. We need to address people's very real and legitimate anxieties about losing jobs, control, and their identities to these AI systems. And we need to do that through things like education, thoughtful tech policy, inclusive design, and reining in the power and wealth of these Silicon Valley billionaires.

Technology can be amazing. actually completely believe in building a better world through technology. That's why I'm a tech reporter. I genuinely love technology. But we need to build a less profit-driven tech landscape. Otherwise, we'll all waste the next decade inventing a million new slurs for different types of computers, and we won't be any closer to building a better tech forward future. If you like this video, please buy a subscription to my Patreon below. Talking about these issues, criticizing big tech and doing journalism means that I cannot get as many brand deals the way that other content creators can. So to do this work, I rely on support directly

from you. You can subscribe to my Patreon or buy a paid subscription to my substack newsletter, usermag.com. That's usermag.com where I write about all of this stuff and more. You can also get my newsletter through my Patreon. And I'm putting out tons of bonus videos, extra podcast content, monthly live streams where I do Q&As and more. Thank you so much for watching. And please let me know what you think about all this in the comments.