Can robots solve gender woes?

The fact that Catherine - who's learned that her ex-husband Theodore has taken up with Samantha, a honey-voiced Operating System who screens his emails, entertains his fantasies and sends his writing off to publishers - comes off as judgmental is testament to Jonze's filmmaking skills. But it's also proof of how deeply we've internalised the notion that artificial intelligence is an extension of male desires and that, really, few things may be hotter than the hard-to-nail promise of female servitude. As Laurie Penny writes in an April 2016 article in The New Statesman, the issue of whether or not robots are slaves designed to serve their masters or sentient beings with inner lives and autonomous instincts has long paralleled the questions we ask of women in the world. READ MORE: * New Zealand could become first country to use Domino's pizza delivery robot * Drones, self-drive cars and'car butler' in our near future * Professor hopes robots will take over the rehabilitation world * Robots could threaten up to half New Zealand's jobs in next 20 years * Robots fooling humans they love something that can't love them back: AI expert * Self-learning robot escapes Russian facility, disrupts traffic * New robot from Google shows off human-like qualities Robots may take on domestic tasks and give working mothers more time. From Metropolis, the 1927 Fritz Lang classic in which Maria, a cyborg whose sultry ways plunge the city and its workers into chaos (she's later burned at a stake) to Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, the hit 1997 spy film whose comely fembots are programmed to ensnare the bumbling Powers with his own libido, female robots are often cast as temptresses or destroyers, coincidentally enough, the same roles reserved for flesh-and-blood women.