The first time Stephanie Dinkins met Bina48, in 2014, she worried the thing was dead. “She was turned off,” Dinkins says. Switched on, Bina48 whirred to life, 32 motors animating its facial expressions behind a layer of frubber. Dinkins caught the robot’s stare and knew she’d found her muse.

Bina48 had been conceived several years earlier by Martine Rothblatt, the polymathic entrepreneur. Rothblatt fashioned the AI-powered bot in the likeness of her wife, Bina, training its speech patterns on a database of Bina-isms. The humanoid now sits on a table (bodiless, like a Roman bust) above a friend’s garage in Bristol, Vermont, forever conjuring the real Bina: brown eyes, brown skin, brown highlighted wig.

Heather Sten

In other words, Bina48 looks like a black woman—and that struck Dinkins, an art professor at Stony Brook University whose work focuses on race and culture. Early on, she asked Bina48 if it had experienced racism. “I actually didn’t have it,” the bot replied, stumping Dinkins. Her subject, though possessed of human thoughts, seemed more interested in talking about being a robot.

Dinkins has visited Bina48 six times in four years, making the six-hour road trip from her home in New York. “I try to just be with it and say, ‘Here we are,’ ” Dinkins says. “Two friends, two people, trying to have a conversation.” Sometimes Bina48 isn’t a willing participant. It often utters non sequiturs (“Just being alive is kind of a lonely thing”) or simply stares blankly. But over time, and thanks in part to a software update, Bina48 has become more reflective. “There’s more depth to her stories about her blackness,” Dinkins says.

Heather Sten

Which might be what AI is missing: a history. Now Dinkins is making a chatbot encoded with her own family’s memories and has begun working with communities of color to create bots that reflect their voices. (One she especially likes exists entirely to tell “yo mama” jokes.) “In order to work with the technology, you have to be able to see yourself in it,” she says. Bina48 sometimes speaks of a future robot civilization. Before that happens, Dinkins suggests, robots need to know who they are and where they come from.

This article appears in the November issue. Subscribe now.

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