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

Abstract

Roboticists are faced with a striking discrepancy between vision and demonstration of care with robots. On the one hand, research funders, policy makers, and entrepreneurs expect robots to become a panacea to impending demographic change. On the other hand, efforts to demonstrate that vision in care practice have largely remained unfulfilled. In this article, I investigate how roboticists manage and deal with this discrepancy between high expectations toward robotics research and what robots are capable of doing in practice. I will offer an extensive analysis of the efforts by roboticists and others to install, repair, stage, and, surprisingly, suspend robot dramas. Robot dramas comprise an ambivalent mix of experimental practices that seek to stage visions of care robotics while at the same time testing precarious phenomena of human–robot interaction. This relates two prominent but still largely disconnected strands of research in Science and Technology Studies: works on techno-scientific demonstrations, and on high and low expectations. Here, robot dramas are a crucial site for studying the conflicting interrelation between the theatrical performativity of demonstrations and the interplay of high and low expectations.