Part I: What Will Probably Happen in 2026 As the new year kicks off—with well wishes, outsized resolutions, and the customary illusionary promise to finally get in shape—here at Robots, actually! we’re doing what we do best: taking a hard look at the shapes of robotics as an industry. 2026 will be a year [...]
A spirit is haunting modern robotics – the spirit of puritanism. That feeling is creeping up on me daily, as I scroll along my Linkedin feed, boredly scouring the self-promotional platitudes and AI-generated how-to carousels we all post on there for something that will make me sit up and compete in Big Ideas, Bigger Thinking, [...]
As we are kicking off our blog series on robotics in, for, and with society, we want to take stock of popular approaches to robotics through the lens of what is written about it - and how. There is, of course, the massively serious business stuff. Whitepapers abound. Reports showcase the latest business graph aesthetics. [...]
Title: How to do Robotics with Words: Language and Prospective Ethics in Design Anthropological Approaches to Emergent Hardware Abstract: "Never say hardware! Ever!” “It´s not a robot dog. It´s a quadruped.” “Pilot is too masculine and military. Just call it an operator.” What kind of language is being employed in speaking about hardware robots, and [...]
Executive summary/Abstract: Thick data is embodied data. Embodiment has always been a paradigm for anthropology – as the existential grounds for culture, without bodies, there is no culture. Moreover, ethnography has been primarily an embodied method. ·AI has many bodies which it can coopt to operate through– traffic cameras, computers screens, websites, portable devices, cars [...]
Abstract: Questions of scale permeate current approaches to empathy in applied human-centered work—and especially design thinking—but they have remained largely unquestioned. What is more, empathy has become an empty signifier, and empathizing is often a near-formulaic and pro-forma endeavor. To catalyze a reworking of the concept, in this paper I synthesize what has been said [...]
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