Gifts and Parasites: Paro the Healthcare Robot and the Logics of Care

Abstract

This social theory and philosophy-oriented paper offers a framework to analyze changes in the logics of care, and their connections to robots in healthcare. If care can be historically understood as a gift given to one another and given back in return, in many post-industrial societies care has been separated from the sphere of family to an independent area of care labor, obscuring the idea of reciprocity commonly linked to care-as-gift. Correspondingly, the robots utilized in healthcare defy the idea of reciprocity yet more extremely. In care robotics social relations go only one way, adhering to the logic of the parasite. Starting with a discussion of the theories of care-as-gift, the paper argues that the logic of the parasite has (partially) replaced the logic of gift in the organization of care. Furthermore, the human-computer interaction implied in the design of the social robot Paro are analyzed in more detail, elucidating the logic of the parasite in action.