cultural robotics
“In Cultural Robotics (2016) we anatomized the topic of Cultural Robotics in four ways; Robots as Maintainers of Culture, Robots as Participants in Culture, Robots as Producers of Culture, and speculation concerning the Advent of Robotics Culture, as a means of defining the spectrum of integration between robots with human culture and beyond. Within this publication, it was concluded that social robots would soon advance beyond interactive embodied entities, to social agents with meaningful cultural impact on a range of human communities and activities, with the potential means to create a culture that might be entirely foreign and incomprehensible to human culture.
In the second installment of Cultural Robotics (2023), we advanced upon the demonstrated integration of robotics deeply into many aspects of human activity and culture, and approached cultural robotics as a political ecology of social robotics: that is, a lens for analyzing the far-reaching impacts of the integration of robots into the human lived experience. We defined ‘political ecology’ as the study of the relationships between political, economic and social factors with environmental issues and changes; in this context, we view the ‘environment’ as the human social sphere.
This third installment and second workshop on Cultural Robotics aims to bring together diverse cultural perspectives to explore how robotics development can effectively integrate sustainability and circular economy principles (knowledge sharing, leasing, reusing, repairing, refurbishing and recycling existing materials) to foster environmentally responsible and socially inclusive innovation when prototyping, testing and developing social robots.
Motivation
Section titled “Motivation”The use of the term Cultural Robotics was first explored in depth by Hooman Samani et al. [1], who attributed the development of culture in robotics to the cultural values of the designers, the importance of embodiment in robotics, and the current (and potential) learning capacity of robots. Samani et al. proposed the potential progression of robots from simple tools, to luxury items, to members of human society and projected that they would one day become an integral part of our culture. In 2015, Dunstan and Koh, together with David Silvera-Tawil, held a workshop at IEEE RO-MAN in Kobe, Japan, which called for contributions attending to what was a relatively new premise: in what ways are social robots participants in, and creators of, culture? The contributions from over fifteen different countries yielded surprising breadth and depth, which signified a growing interest in the influence and contributions of robots and artificial intelligence (AI) to culture, as well as the influence of human cultures on the design and applications of social robots. The research presented at the 2015 workshop was brought together and published as a collection of works entitled Cultural Robotics [2]. In the opening chapter of this book, Dunstan et. al. described how robots could not only be maintainers of and participants in human culture but could also have the potential to develop their own culture, entirely unrecognisable to humans.
Revisiting this field in 2023, Dunstan et al. edited a book entitled Cultural Robotics: Social Robots and their Emergent Cultural Ecologies [3] offering a new lens for examining the reach of social robotics, that of a cultural ecology, where consideration for the broader political, economic, and social factors impacted by this field become inseparable to the evaluation of it. They argued for the development of social robotics to be increasingly informed by community-led transdisciplinary research, to be decentralised and democratised, shaped by teams with a diversity of backgrounds, informed by both experts and non-experts, and tested in both traditional and non-traditional platforms.
Looking forward in the field of Cultural Robotics, we now hope to draw on the many diverse cultural robotics practices we have seen evidenced within this previous work, to collaboratively share methods for inclusive sustainability and longevity in robotics development.”