Evaluating the argument

The design of our robots, voice assistants, and the like play little, if any, role in perpetuating harmful stereotypes and social injustices, so there’s no reason to push for changes to accommodate the overblown concerns of these critics.

Critics raise reasonable points about how biases can unconsciously affect robot design, so we should make sure designers understand this issue, trusting them to recognize when their biases are in play and eliminate these troubling influences from their designs.

These concerns are quite serious, and we can’t simply leave it up to designers to fix the problem themselves; rather, we should establish independent ethical boards to review anthropomorphic designs and ensure that only designs that are free of stereotyped features are approved for production.

These concerns are serious, but top-down solutions, like ethical review boards, won’t work. Real progress on this problem will only come by ensuring that there’s enough diversity of experiences and perspectives within the design community that biasing influences will be identified and neutralized more easily and early in the design process.

These critics point to a troubling and unavoidable problem with anthropomorphic design framing, so we should pursue the only real solution: we should stop designing robots, voice assistants, and other technologies to look, talk, and act in ways that mimic humans.