When the social relevance of robotic applications is addressed today, the use of assistive technology in care settings is almost always the first example. So-called care robots are presented as a solution to the nursing crisis, despite doubts about their technological readiness and the lack of concrete usage scenarios in everyday nursing practice. We inquire into this interconnection of social robotics and care. We show how both are made available for each other in three arenas: innovation policy, care organization, and robotic engineering. First, we analyze the discursive “logics” of care robotics within European innovation policy, second, we disclose how care robotics is encountering a historically grown conflict within health care organization, and third we show how care scenarios are being used in robotic engineering. From this diagnosis, we derive a threefold critique of robotics in healthcare, which calls attention to the politics, historicity, and social situatedness of care robotics in elderly care.
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.
Technology takes an unprecedented position in contemporary society. In particular, it has become part and parcel of governmental attempts to manufacture life in new ways. Such ideas concerning the (self-)governance of life organize around the same contention: that technology and life are, in fact, highly interconnectable. This is surprising because if one enters the sites of techno-scientific experimentation, those visions turn out to be much frailer and by no means “in place” yet. Rather, they afford or enforce constant interfacing work, a particular mode of manufacturing life, rendering disparate, sturdy, and often surprisingly incompatible things available for one another. Here, we contend that both of those aspects, pervasive rationalities of interconnectability and practices of interfacing mark the cornerstones of what we call a new(ly articulated) techno-bio-politics of life. In order to grasp the government of life under the technological condition, we must understand how both human and non-human entities are being rendered interconnectable and re-worked through practices of interfacing. We take neuro-technology and care robotics as two illustrative cases. Our analysis shows that the contemporary government of life is not primarily concerned with life itself in its biological re-constitution but rather with life as it is interfaced with and through technology.
Simultaneous sulfonylation/arylation of styrene derivatives is achieved in a photoredox-catalyzed three-component reaction using visible light. A broad variety of difunctionalized products is accessible in mostly excellent yields and high diastereoselectivity. The developed reaction is scalable and suitable for the modification of styrene-functionalized biomolecules. Mechanistic investigations suggest the transformation to be operating through a designed sequence of radical formation and radical combination.<br>
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.