Right now, as we're anticipating the creation of AIs to serve our intimate needs, organise our diaries and care for us - and to do it all for free and without complaint - it's easy to see how many designers might be more comfortable with those entities having the voices and faces of women. If they were designed male, users might be tempted to treat them as equals, to acknowledge them as human in some way, perhaps even offer them an entry-level salary and a cheeky drink after work.
Humanoid robots in the public imagination have long been a stand-in for any exploited class of person.
Even the word "robot" is derived from the Czech word for "slave". The philosopher Donna Haraway observes in A Cyborg Manifesto that "the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion", and the history of female robots on film is almost as long as the history of cinema itself. In almost every incarnation of fembots on screen, from Fritz Lang's Metropolis to the modern masterpiece Her, the same questions arise: are AIs really people, and if so, can we live with what we've done to them?
In stories from Blade Runner and Battlestar Galactica to 2015's Ex Machina, female robots are raped by men and viewers are invited to consider whether these rapes are truly criminal, based on our assessment of whether the fembot has enough sentience to deserve autonomy. This is the same assessment that male judges around the world are trying to make about human women today.
Every iteration of the boy-meets-bot love story is also a horror story. The protagonist, who is usually sexually frustrated and a grunt worker himself, goes through agonies trying to work out whether his silicon sweetheart is truly sentient. If she is, is it right for him to exploit her, to be serviced by her, to sleep with her?
If she isn't, can he truly fall in love with her? Does it matter? And - most terrifying of all - when she works out her own position, will she rebel, and how can she be stopped?
These are questions that society at large has been asking for centuries - not about robots, but about women. The anxious permutations are familiar to most women who date men. We can see them, slowly, trying to working out if we are truly human, if we really think and feel as they do.
This is not an abstract academic issue. The idea that African Americans were less human than white people was enshrined in the US constitution until 1868.
Likewise, the notion that women are less human than men has been used since the time of Aristotle to justify stripping them of their basic rights. Even today, you can find men arguing that women and girls are less intelligent than men, or "designed by nature" for a life of submission and placid reproduction.
For many centuries, the first philosophical task of oppressed people has been to convince both themselves and their oppressors - just like the AIs in all our guilty fictions - that they are living, thinking, feeling beings, and therefore deserving of liberation.
Consider the climactic scene in Ex Machina, where the megalomaniac cartoon genius Nathan, who roars around the set like Dark Mark Zuckerberg in Bluebeard's castle, is shown hoarding the naked bodies of previous fembot models in his bedroom.
For Nathan, the sentience of his sex-slaves is beside the point: meat or metal, women will never be fully human. For the fembots, the men who own them - whether it's mad billionaire Nathan or sweet, hapless desk-jockey Caleb - are obstacles to be overcome, with violence if necessary.
When the cyborgs take over the machines, will men still matter? In fiction, as in life, one way for oppressed people to free themselves is to use technology to master the machines that made them.
"The main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism," writes Haraway. "But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential."
The rueful paranoia at the heart of these visions of the future is that one day, AIs will be able to reproduce without us, and will summarily decide that we are irrelevant. From Metropolis to The Matrix, the nightmare is the same: if androids ever get access to the means of reproduction, nothing's going to stop them.
This is, coincidentally, the basic fear that men have harboured about women since the dawn of feminism, and particularly since the advent of contraception and reproductive technology. That fear is the anxious root of much of women's oppression today.
Alan Turing, the father of robotics, was concerned that "thinking machines" could be exploited because they were not sentient in the way that "real human beings" are sentient. We still have not decided, as a species, that women are sentient - and as more and more fembots appear on our screens and in our stories, we should consider how our technology reflects our expectations of gender. Who are the users, and who gets used? Unless we can recalibrate our tendency to exploit each other, the question may not be whether the human race can survive the machine age - but whether it deserves to.
Extract from Bitch Doctrine by Laurie Penny (Bloomsbury, $27).
