Caring for robots: How care comes to matter in human-machine interfacing

Abstract

Care robots promise to assist older people in an ageing society. This article investigates the socio-material conditions of care with robots by focusing on the usually invisible practices of human-machine interfacing. I define human-machine interfacing as the activities by roboticists and others to render interaction between robots and people possible in the first place. This includes, efforts to render prototypical arrangements of care ‘robot-friendly’. In my video-assisted ethnography of human-robot interaction (HRI) experiments. I identify four types of interfacing practices, where care comes to matter: integrating the ephemeral entity that is ‘a robot’, helping it by way of mundane courtesies, making users ‘fit’ for interacting with it, and establishing corridors of interaction between the robot and people’s bodies. I show that robots do not so much care for (older) people but rather, the other way around – people need to care for robots. Hence, care robots are not simply agents of care but also objects of care, rendering necessary a symmetrical analysis of human-machine interfacing. Furthermore, these practices do not merely reflect the prototypical state of the art in robotics. Rather, they indicate a more general mode of how robots and people interface. I argue that care with robots requires us to re-consider the exclusive focus on the human and at least complement it with care for the non-human and, incidentally, the robotic, too.

Robot Drama: Investigating Frictions between Vision and Demonstration in Care Robotics

“…By way of this double strategy roboticists aim to expose their machines to increasing levels of complexity (as is promised in robot visions) but also shield them from complications that these machines cannot (yet) deal with (as is usually obscured in those discourses). Finally, Lipp (2022) has shown how roboticists protect their robots from these unforeseen complexities in testing environments. Contrary to the imaginary of robots caring for people, roboticists extensively care for their machines by rendering testing environments robot-friendly.…”

“…Of course, this does not mean that roboticists do not exert any control. Rather they adapt and strategically simplify the test situation in order to support the robot’s operation (for an extensive analysis of this in the same project, see Lipp 2022). As an example, roboticists restrict and define the user’s position (in this case, a particular chair), they fix or abort the robotic system from the control room in case of error, or they adapt the environment, for example, by removing carpets or covering certain parts of the apartment’s decoration.…”

“…Robots have a hard time dealing with ambiguity and complexity in situations of use (Lipp 2022). They need rather clearly defined, discrete instructions to perform a service in an autonomous manner.…”

Staging Paro: The care of making robot(s) care

“…Fixed in video demonstrations as an 'eternal ethnographic present' (Suchman, 2006, p. 238), the intuitiveness of interactions between her and 'her' robot was anything but obvious for other users, and the functioning of the robot was shown to rely on a 'trained reading of Kismet's actions and her extended history of labors with the machine ' (p. 246). Lipp (2023) echoes these findings in his account of roboticists' 'interfacing practices' during pre-tests and tests of a care robots in a homelike test apartment, that is, 'activities by roboticists and others to render interaction between robots and people possible in the first place'. In another context, the mediating role of engineers (and at the same time investigators) has proven to be a decisive element of the 'situational dynamics' of humanmachine couplings between preverbal infants and the RUBI robot (Alac et al, 2011); although 'the robot [was] not under the absolute control of the roboticist …, when enacting [its] social character, the roboticists respond [ed] to the complex interactional trajectories often initiated by the toddlers' (p. 919).…”

“…In line with recent attempts to unfold the socio-material conditions of care robots’ testing (Blond, 2018; Jeon et al, 2020; Leeson, 2017; Lipp, 2023; Wright, 2018a), this article investigates the tentative introduction and staging of Paro, a seal robot, for everyday care of older adults suffering from dementia in a French care home (EHPAD) in the Paris suburbs. Contrasting with existing biomedical research that disentangles Paro’s therapeutic effects from ‘the broader social context that scaffolds interactions between older adults and [it]’ (Chang & Šabanović, 2015), it also extends the scope of previous ethnographic accounts of human participants’ work to make robots ‘sociable’, insofar as it homes in on the care workers’ pervasive micro-practices of interaction framing in situ .…”