What is a clanker and why do we need this word? : NPR
A pair of 1x androids is displayed at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in Excel on May 30, 2023 in London, England.
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Debate on summer song Rage on, but if there was a contest for a summer word, a front runner would surely be onomatopoeia, clanker.
In recent weeks, Clanker has reached viral levels in Tiktok and Instagram. A popular video Since July, a delivery robot on wheels – the genre that looks like a mobile cooler with flashing lights that look like eyes – stopped on a plot of grass on the side of a road. As a man and a woman pass by, they point and cry: “Fillthy … remove them in the streets. Clanker! Clanker! Clanker!”
Even with little background, it clearly emerges from the context indices that Clanker is not a good thing, but in this episode of the word of the week, we will answer – what exactly means?
Adam Aleksic, linguist, author and creator of content better known on social networks under the name of @etomologynerdtold NPR that it was a derogatory term for robots that arise from Star WarS Universe dating from 2005. “He was referenced in Star Wars and in the Clone Wars series. They would call clan robots because of the sound they have made. This clearly implies clanking. … And then we adopted it because it seems useful.”
While other science fiction franchises and fandoms have created their own lexicon which included insults of robots – Battlestar Galactica and Blade Runner used the skin -employment as a pejorative for the robots related to the man – Aleksic declared, these terms did not really understand because they did not make much sense. He noted that Clanker has already had a long life on Star Wars’ srobeddits, specifically of the Battlefront video games, and as the same, where people use it to minimize robots. According to Aleksic, the reason why Clanker goes the dominant current is that it meets a need because we see more robots in our daily life, according to Aleksic. And he adds, he has now evolved into generative AI platforms like Chatgpt.
Visitors are playing at Starwars Battlefront, a video game published by Pandemic Studios, October 28, 2015 at the Paris Game Week.
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“I remember the January tweets of this year when people said:” Oh, we need an insult for AI “and finally, it seems that this cultural need is satisfied,” he said.
Last week, Senator Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., Promoted his latest Bill on X, using the insult. “In tired of screaming” representative “in the phone 10 times just to speak to a human being? My new bill ensures that you don’t have to talk to a clanker if you don’t want,” He wrote.
Aleksic said that the use of the word intrinsically creates an external group. An American state of mind against them. But the irony, he noted, is that by attaching the word to non-attractive creations (at least for the moment), it anthropomorside the robots similar to an ethnic group or a group of people. “And at the same time, it brings them to humans to be even dehumanized in the first place. Ironically, people who say clanker, attribute more personality to these robots that they really exist.”
Many memes now circulating in xenophobia of all this, and what social media users call, robot racism or robophobia. Using existing stereotypes and tropes, they joke about a not too distant future where robots are omnipresent as second -class citizens, confronted with discrimination in the same way as blacks and other racial or ethnic groups in America have historically been confronted.
In one Video with more than 7.7 million viewsThe user of Tiktok @vibestealer, who is a young black man, claims that it is 2044 and that his daughter brought back a boyfriend of robot. Disturbing music plays in the background when he asks questions about the intentions of the robot, while coughing the words “clanker” and “garbage” in his fist. “I don’t want you to have anywhere near my daughter!” He cried at some point.
Another popular iteration of the same presents people who pretend to apologize to their future robots suzerains for past anti-robot transgressions, including the use of “word C”.
The robots all arrive for us
An autonomous service delivery robot, which uses AI and is without emissions, crosses a pedestrian crossing on a sidewalk on March 19, 2024 in West Hollywood, California.
Mario Tama / Getty Images from North America
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The propagation of clankers occurs while AI is fundamentally transforming work and the workplace as we know them.
“We have a social need right now to meet the proliferation of AI, especially when AI takes human jobs, especially when they replace online creators,” said Aleksic.
A 2023 Pew Research Center Survey have found that the majority of Americans are wary of the use of AI in the workplace. Seventy percent said they thought that using AI at work will have a major impact on workers over the next 20 years. About a third believe that the advantages and damage will also be divided for workers. In the meantime, 22% are uncertain of its potential effect.
Perhaps no other generation feels that more acute than generation Z, many of which are now graduates from the college. As NPR reportedEconomists believe that the 2025 labor market is the most difficult in the last decade – not to mention the pandemic period. And this is likely to worsen in a generation.
“To be clear on a longer time horizon, and by longer, we are talking about 15 to 20 years old, not 50 or one hundred years, there will be practically nothing that a human being can do that a machine can not do as well or better for a small fraction of the cost,” he said Adam Dorr, the director of research for disturbing technologies, said NPR. “This is simply where the technology of artificial intelligence, robotics and automation is directed.”
For the moment, he said, we live in a period of grace, when AI will improve the work we do. “They will kill our productivity. They will complete human workforce.”
In the opinion of Dorr, which he describes as optimistic, it creates a chance for a world in which humans will be free from work. The chore which is the work and the manufacture and distribution of products will be moved to robots and an AI leaving people released in a way that they have never been before. And there is no time to waste creating a brand new framework for that.
“There is certainly an emergency to this whole situation. But that does not mean that it is a cause of panic. It is not a crisis, and it is not yet a disaster,” he said.
The question is: will we always say Clanker in this world?
