Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Toward a Critical Posthumanism for Social Robotics

  • Published:
International Journal of Social Robotics Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

In response to theorists of the social-relational turn as a framework for making sense of how humans relate with social robots, I offer an in-depth critique into underlying arguments related to differences in origin as a foundational reason for dismissing posthumanist perspectives in social robotics. In particular, I argue that critical posthumanist sensibilities for social robotics can offer generative accounts for making sense of the relation among, between, and with humans and social robots. Unpacking how arguments separating humans and robots related to origin—genesis—collapse when considering critical posthumanist insights on anthropogenesis, biogenesis, and technogenesis, I explore the value of a critical posthumanist approach in social robotics. A critical posthumanism for social robotics displaces dichotomous nature-culture or natural-artificial binaries and instead embraces an entangled view of relationality. This essay starts to work toward realizing posthumanism’s critical sensibilities that take into account the scalar impact of the planetary meta-condition of the Anthropocene on humans, robots, and their relations.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Data Availability

Data sharing not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analyzed during the current study. This is a theoretical essay in which no human participants or their data were involved. No ethical approval is required.

References

  1. Coeckelbergh M (2012) Growing moral relations: Critique of moral status ascription. Palgrave Macmillan

  2. Gunkel DJ (forthcoming). The relational turn: Thinking robots otherwise. In J. Loh & W. Loh (Eds.), Social robotics and the good life: The normative side of forming emotional bonds with robots. Transcript. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4099209

  3. Gunkel DJ (2012) The machine question: Critical questions on AI, robots, and ethics. MIT Press

  4. Gunkel DJ (2018) Robot rights. MIT Press

  5. Coeckelbergh M (2010) Robot rights? Towards a social-relational justification of moral consideration. Ethics Inf Technol 12:209–221. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-010-9235-5

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Coeckelbergh M (2021) Three responses to anthropomorphism in social robotics: Towards a critical, relational, and hermeneutic approach. Int J Social Robot. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-021-00770-0

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Sætra HS (2021) Challenging the neo-anthropocentric relational approach to ethics. Front Rob AI 8:744426. https://doi.org/10.3389/frobt.2021.744426

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Rife TS (2020) Scaling the necropolitical Anthropocene. Departures in Critical Qualitative Research 9(4):77–91. https://doi.org/10.1525/dcqr.2020.9.4.77

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Lorimer J (2009) Posthumanism/posthumanistic geographies. In: Kitchin R, Thrift N (eds) International encyclopedia of human geography, vol 8. Elsevier, pp 344–354

  10. Reeves B, Nass C (1996) The media equation: How people treat computers, television, and new media like real people and places. Cambridge University Press

  11. Nass C, Moon Y (2000) Machines and mindlessness: Social responses to computers. J Soc Issues 56(1):81–103. https://doi.org/10.1111/0022-4537.00153

    Article  Google Scholar 

  12. Gambino A, Fox J, Ratan RA (2020) Building a stronger CASA: Extending the computers are social actors paradigm. Human-Machine Communication 1:71–85. https://doi.org/10.30658/hmc.1.5

    Article  Google Scholar 

  13. Lombard M, Xu K (2021) Social responses to media technologies in the 21st century: The Media Are Social Actors paradigm. Human-Machine Communication 2:29–55. https://doi.org/10.30658/hmc.2.2

    Article  Google Scholar 

  14. Lakshmanan N (2021) The misogyny of transhumanism. In N. Rambukkana (Ed.), Intersectional automations: Robotics, AI, algorithms, and equity (pp. 99–118). Lexington

  15. Yusoff K (2015) Geologic subjects: Nonhuman origins, geomorphic aesthetics and the art of becoming inhuman. Cult Geographies 22(3):383–407. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1474474014545301

    Article  Google Scholar 

  16. Yusoff K (2021) The inhumanities. Annals of the American Association of Geographers 111(3):663–676. https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2020.1814688

    Article  Google Scholar 

  17. Dixon D, Hawkins H, Straughan E (2012) Of human birds and living rocks: Remaking aesthetics for post-human worlds. Dialogues in Human Geography 2(3):249–270. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F2043820612468692

    Article  Google Scholar 

  18. Meehan K, Shaw IGR, Marston SA (2013) Political geographies of the object. Political Geogr 33:1–10. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2012.11.002

    Article  Google Scholar 

  19. Bogost I (2012) Alien phenomenology, or what it’s like to be a thing. University of Minnesota Press

  20. Broglio R (2011) Surface encounters: Thinking with animals and art. University of Minnesota Press

  21. Banks J (2020) Good robots, bad robots: Morally valenced behavior effects on perceived mind, morality, and trust. Int J Social Robot. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-020-00692-3

    Article  Google Scholar 

  22. Banks J (2021) Of like mind: The (mostly) similar mentalizing of robots and humans. Technol Mind Behav 1(2). https://doi.org/10.1037/tmb0000025

  23. Sotala K, Yampolskiy RV (2015) Responses to catastrophic AGI risk: A survey. Phys Scr 90(1):018001. https://doi.org/10.1088/0031-8949/90/1/018001

    Article  Google Scholar 

  24. Yusoff K (2016) Anthropogenesis: Origins and endings in the Anthropocene. Theory Cult Soc 33(2):3–28. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0263276415581021

    Article  Google Scholar 

  25. Cohen JJ, Duckert L (eds) (2017) Veer ecology: A companion for environmental thinking. University of Minnesota Press

  26. Tsing A, Swanson H, Gan E, Bubandt N (eds) (2017) Arts of living on a damage planet. The University of Minnesota Press

  27. Haraway D (2015) Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making kin. Environ Humanit 6:159–165. https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3615934

    Article  Google Scholar 

  28. Stengers I (2014) Gaia, the urgency to think (and feel). In The thousand names of Gaia: From the Anthropocene to the age of the earth. https://osmilnomesdegaia.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/isabelle-stengers.pdf

  29. Lewis SL, Maslin MA (2015) Defining the Anthropocene. Nature 519:171–180. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14258

    Article  Google Scholar 

  30. Elhacham E, Ben-Uri L, Grozovski J, Bar-On YM, Milo R (2020) Global human-made mass exceeds all living biomass. Nature 588:442–444. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-3010-5

    Article  Google Scholar 

  31. Cronon W (1995) Uncommon ground: Rethinking the human place in nature. W. W. Norton & Company

  32. Lorimer J, Driessen C (2016) From ‘Nazi cows’ to cosmopolitan ‘ecological engineers’: Specifying rewilding through a history of Heck Cattle. Annals of the American Association of Geographers 106(3):631–652. https://doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2015.1115332

    Article  Google Scholar 

  33. Grebowicz M (2015) The national park to come. Stanford University Press

  34. Minteer BA, Pyne SJ (2015) After preservation: Saving American nature in the age of humans. The University of Chicago Press

  35. Cave S, Dihal K (2020) The whiteness of AI. Philos Technol 33:685–703. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-020-00415-6

    Article  Google Scholar 

  36. Gilbert SF, Sapp J, Tauber AI (2012) A symbiotic view of life: We have never been individuals. Q Rev Biol 87(4):325–341. https://doi.org/10.1086/668166

    Article  Google Scholar 

  37. Gilbert SF (2017) Holobiont by birth: Multilineage individuals as the concretion of cooperative processes. In: Tsing A, Swanson H, Gan E, Bubandt N (eds) Arts of living on a damaged planet: Ghosts and monsters of the Anthropocene. University of Minnesota Press, pp M73–M89

  38. Escobar A (1996) Elements for a post-structural political ecology. Futures 28:325–343

    Article  Google Scholar 

  39. Chakrabarty D (2009) The climate of history: Four theses. Crit Inq 35(2):197–222. https://doi.org/10.1086/596640

    Article  Google Scholar 

  40. Gandy M (2019) The fly that tried to save the world: Saproxylic geographies and other-than-human ecologies. Trans Inst Br Geogr 44(2):382–406. https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12281

    Article  Google Scholar 

  41. Dehnert M (2021) Communication geographies of human-machine understanding: Entangled agencies, synthetic aesthetics, and machine matterings. Communication Stud 72(6):1146–1159. https://doi.org/10.1080/10510974.2021.2011360

    Article  Google Scholar 

  42. Yusoff K (2018) A billion black Anthropocenes or none. University of Minnesota Press

  43. Tollon F, Naidoo K (2021) On and beyond artifacts in moral relations: Accounting for power and violence in Coeckelbergh’s social relationism. AI Soc. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-021-01303-z

    Article  Google Scholar 

  44. Gemeinboeck P (2022) Difference-in-relation: Diffracting human-robot encounters. J New Materialist Res 3(1):29–55. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-015-0631-6

    Article  Google Scholar 

  45. Kubes T (2019) Bypassing the uncanny valley: Sex robots and robot sex beyond mimicry. In J. Loh & M. Coeckelbergh (Eds.), Feminist philosophy of technology (pp. 59–73). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-476-04967-4_4

  46. Gemeinboeck P, Saunders R (2022) Moving beyond the mirror: Relational and performative meaning making in human-robot communication. AI Soc 37:549–563. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-021-01212-1

    Article  Google Scholar 

  47. Coeckelbergh M (2011) You, robot: On the linguistic construction of artificial others. AI Soc 26:61–69. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-010-0289-z

    Article  Google Scholar 

  48. Kim M-S, Kim E-J (2013) Humanoid robots as “the cultural other”: Are we able to love our creations? AI Soc 28:309–318. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-012-0397-z

    Article  Google Scholar 

  49. Kim M-S (2019) Robots as the “mechanical other”: Transcending karmic dilemma. AI Soc 34:321–330. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-018-0841-9

    Article  Google Scholar 

  50. Kim M-S (2022) Meta-narratives on machinic otherness: Beyond anthropocentrism and exoticism. AI Soc. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-022-01404-3

    Article  Google Scholar 

  51. Neff G, Nagy P (2016) Talking to bots: Symbiotic agency and the case of Tay. Int J Communication 10:4915–4931

    Google Scholar 

  52. Das S (2020) Subversive AI: Resisting automated algorithmic surveillance with human-centered adversarial machine learning. In Resistance AI workshop at NeuvIPS. Retrieved from https://sauvik.me/uploads/paper/pdf/27/file.pdf

  53. Park S (2021) More than skin deep: A response to “the whiteness of AI. Philos Technol 34:1961–1966. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-021-00485-0

    Article  Google Scholar 

  54. Sparrow R (2020) Robotics has a race problem. Sci Technol Hum Values 45(3):538–560. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0162243919862862

    Article  Google Scholar 

  55. Brevini B (2022) Is AI good for the planet? Polity

  56. Haraway DJ (2016) Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press

Download references

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the editorial team and anonymous reviewers for their comments and support. Any mistakes are, of course, my own.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. The Hugh Downs School of Human Communication, Arizona State University, P.O. Box 871205, 85287-1205, Tempe, AZ, USA

    Marco Dehnert

Authors
  1. Marco Dehnert
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Marco Dehnert.

Ethics declarations

Conflict of interest

The author declares that they have no conflict of interest, financial or otherwise.

Additional information

Publisher’s Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Springer Nature or its licensor holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Dehnert, M. Toward a Critical Posthumanism for Social Robotics. Int J of Soc Robotics 14, 2019–2027 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-022-00930-w

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Revised:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-022-00930-w

Keywords

Search

Navigation