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Critical geographies of social robotics

Casey R. Lynch

PII: S2666-3783(21)00001-5
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.diggeo.2021.100010
Reference: DIGGEO 100010

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Received date: 24 November 2020

Accepted date: 23 January 2021

Please cite this article as: C.R. Lynch, Critical geographies of social robotics, (2021),
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Critical Geographies of Social Robotics

Author: Casey R. Lynch1

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Department of Geography, University of Nevada Reno, Email: caseylynch@unr.edu

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Critical Geographies of Social Robotics

The rapid growth of interest in digital geographies over the past decade has led to important
interventions and debates examining smart cities, platform urbanism, Big Data analytics, algorithmic
assemblages, and a range of other topics. This work has helped elucidate the complex and evolving
roles of digital systems in the production of space (Kitchin & Dodge, 2014; Leszczynski, 2015), the
agency of technical objects (Ash, 2015), differentiated posthuman agency (Rose, 2017), and the
production of subjectivities (Elwood & Leszczynski, 2018; Lynch, 2020). This commentary is a call
for geographers to extend the critical insights of digital geographies to engage questions of social
robotics and human-robot interaction (HRI).

While a robot can be defined simply as an ―engineered machine that senses, thinks, and acts‖ (Lin et
al., 2011, p. 943), social robots in particular ―interact with humans and each other in a socially
acceptable fashion, conveying intention in a human-perceptible way, and are empowered to resolve

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goals with fellow agents, be they human or robot‖ (Daily et al., 2017, p. 214). In contrast to
industrial robots designed to operate in controlled environments, innovations in social robotics has

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led to the proliferation of robots operating across a range of complex, dynamic, everyday spaces—
from homes, schools, and hospitals, to malls, offices, and city streets (Fortunati et al., 2015)—taking

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on new roles in policing, education, care work, and the service industry (Nocks, 2008). These robots
are meant to interact with humans in increasingly intimate ways, producing data about their
encounters through a variety of cameras, microphones, and other sensors; using that data to draw
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inferences about an individual‘s identity, behavior, emotional state, or future intentions; and acting
on those inferences to respond to its social environment.
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The design, production, and deployment of social robots should be of interest to geographers for a
range of immediate political and practical reasons as social robots increasingly intervene in the
spaces of everyday life. Schwiter and Steiner (2020) highlight how the proliferation of robots in care
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work raises pressing ethical questions while also pointing to the need to trace ongoing changes in the
organization of care economies. Del Casino (2016), though deploying a broader definition of ‗robot‘,
highlights issues of labor displacement, surveillance, and state violence in relation to robots as
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questions for geographic inquiry. Elsewhere, journalists have highlighted the use of security robots
to deter homeless encampments on the streets of San Francisco (McCormick, 2017). All the while,
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observers have noted that the COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically increased demand for social
robots across a range of use cases (Berreby, 2020). Yet, in addition to the practical and political need
to critically engage an emerging industry that aims to increasingly intervene in everyday life, I argue
that critical geographic engagement with social robotics can also prompt broader theoretical insights
around questions of importance across digital geographies—including on themes of space,
intelligence, affect and emotion, and the ‗human.‘

Space
Geographers have long theorized the relationship between digital technologies and the production
of space—including insights about the ―automatic production of space‖ (Thrift & French, 2002) and
the transduction of space (Kitchin & Dodge, 2005), and reflections on emerging forms of digital
spatial ―media/tion‖ (Leszczynski, 2015). These works are based on extensive analyses of the
recursive relationships between processes of digital sensing and data production and their related
algorithmic outputs that increasingly (re)direct and/or mediate spatial practices, processes, and
encounters. As embodied, sensing, artificial agents, social robots dramatically intensify and speed-up
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the recursive circuits of sensing and acting, at the same time that they present new opportunities for
digital systems to more directly sense and act in the material world. Social robots produce new kinds
of spatial data at the embodied scale and perspective of the robot situated in a spatial
environment—including data about the people and objects it encounters and its interactions with
them. This immediate, sensory input data determines the robot‘s socio-spatial behavior—how it
responds to its environment (Brooks, 1999).

Geographers are well situated to critically explore the social, spatial, and computational logics that
inform the programming of robot behavior, as well as the impacts that robots‘ presence and
behavior have on the spaces where they are deployed. In doing so, there is an opportunity to
critically engage the growing body of literature within HRI that is struggling to theorize the
complexity of social space. Though not always explicitly posed in spatial terms, HRI researchers are
increasingly interested in robotic interactions ―in everyday contexts across a wide range of tasks and
situations,‖ ―in complex social settings,‖ or in relation to ―social dynamics in situ‖ (Jung & Hinds,

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2018, p. 1-2). This concern with robotic behavior in the spaces of everyday life is typically described
in the robotics literature as HRI ―in the wild.‖ While much of this interest within robotics stems

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from a desire to better engineer robots to operate in those spaces, geographers have an opportunity
to engage in these debates to critically analyze the spatial logics and imaginaries on which social

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robotic development is based and question the ways social robotic interactions may work to produce
and reconfigure the spaces of everyday life.
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Intelligence
Studying social robotics can provide opportunities for geographers to engage broader
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interdisciplinary debates around the nature of intelligence and the kinds of intelligence being
engineered in AI and robotic systems. Despite commonly invoking notions of ―smartness,‖
sentience, and thinking in their work on digital systems, few geographers have sought to critically
theorize what those terms might mean or how different theories of intelligence—including the
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competing theories within AI research and development—may prompt new theorization about
digital futures (Lynch & Del Casino, 2020). The abilities of social robots to sense and respond to
their environments ―in a socially acceptable fashion‖–including through active forms of
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communication with humans–raise questions about reductive understandings of AI as a purely

calculative form of intelligence. AI and robotics engineers increasingly discuss questions of social
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and emotional intelligences (Barchard et al., 2020; Picard, 2008), while behavior-based robotics has
long understood intelligence as emergent through affective, embodied encounters in the material
world (Brooks, 1999).

In behavior-based robotics—sometimes called ―New AI‖ or ―Nouvelle AI‖—perception and action

are directly linked without the intermediation of complex computational forms of cognition.
Roboticists layer levels of robotic behavior based around the robot‘s sensory interaction in its
environment in order to produce behaviors that might be perceived as more ―intelligent‖ and allow
the robot to better engage in its environment. Indeed, it is this model of intelligence that has been
particularly influential in giving rise to many of the social robots emerging today—in addition to
robotic innovations like the Mars rovers (Vertesi, 2012). This form of intelligence contrasts in
important ways with the logics of traditional AI based on symbolic reasoning, the connectionist
models of intelligence at the heart of neural networks, and common forms of Big Data analysis that
abstract data from the messy, material environments in which they are produced. While geographers
should explore all of these theories of intelligence in order to make sense of the multiple forms of
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AI operating in the world today, I argue that BBR‘s focus on embodied and emplaced practices of
sensing and acting are particularly ripe for a critical geographic engagement.

Affect and Emotion

The theory of intelligence at the core of behavior-based robotics in general, and contemporary social
robots in particular, shares many common features with geographers‘ engagements with theories of
affect. Indeed, Thrift (2004, p. 60) makes the relationship between affect and intelligence clear in
asserting that ―[a]ffect is a different kind of intelligence about the world, but it is intelligence none-
the-less.‖ Wilson (2010) further explores this relationship through her excavation of the role of
affect in the history and evolution of AI. The proliferation of social robots into everyday spaces
offers opportunities for geographers to explore the production and evolution of affects in human-
robot and human-human interactions and the possibilities they present for particular kinds of
robotic futures. Theories of affect can help geographers critically examine both how robots sense
and make sense of the world, as well as how robots produce affects in their myriad encounters with

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human and nonhuman others through their expressive behaviors in complex everyday
environments.

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Social robots also offer opportunities for geographers to further explore the relationship between

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affect and emotion and their potential manipulation. While geographers have long distinguished
between theories of affect as more-than-human, non-representational, and pre-cognitive and
theories of emotion as human-centered, cognitively-processed, and expressed (Pile, 2010), it is
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important to note that no such distinction is drawn in social robotics and the related fields of
artificial emotional intelligence or affective computing (Daily et al., 2017). Many social robots boast
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emotional analysis capabilities in which they draw conclusions about the emotional state of a human
interlocutor based on facial expressions, body language, and even biological indicators like heart rate
monitored through cameras and remote sensors on the robot. The robot uses this data to determine
if a person is happy, sad, tired, stressed, angry, etc. or some fuzzy combination of these. Those
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determinations can then be used to influence the robot‘s internal state (activating or suppressing
different drives) and outward behavior—that is, how it responds in human interaction. The
objective of many robotics companies—in many instances openly expressed—is to better
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understand human emotions in order to manipulate them through affective relationships between
humans and robots (Krakovsky, 2018). Such forms of manipulation are not unique to robots, as
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evidenced by cases of data-driven emotional manipulation in social media, though emotionally

intelligent social robots potentially expand and intensify these practices (Yonck, 2020). Geographers
have an extensive literature and theoretical vocabulary to draw on to make sense of how robots
purport to sense and represent human emotion and aim to engineer particular kinds of human-
robotic affective encounters. Social robotics offers an important opportunity for geographers to
extend existing insights on the politics of affect, its engineering, and its manipulation (Ash, 2010).

The ‘Human’
Finally, a critical geographic engagement with social robots and their proliferation into the spaces of
everyday life can prompt new reflections about the nature of the ‗human.‘ While studies of social
robotics can certainty contribute to ongoing theorizations of the posthuman focused on decentering
the figure of the ‗human‘ from social geographic analysis (Panelli, 2010), they can also contribute to
critical theorizations of the historical production of the ‗human‘ as a category and related processes
of humanization and dehumanization. Feminist scholars Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora (2019,
p. 16), for instance, argue that:
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Engineering imaginaries about technological newness that propose to reimagine human form
and function through technological surrogates taking on dull, dirty, repetitive, and
reproductive work associated with racialized, gendered, enslaved, indentured, and colonized
labor populations thus inherit the tension between humanization and dehumanization at the
heart of Western European and US imperial projects.

In a similar move, Jennifer Rhee‘s (2018, p. 175) study of robotic imaginaries ―offers a way of
making sense of how the concept of the human is imaginatively inscribed, how humans are
dehumanized, and how to reconfigure robots in ways that do not replicate extant systems of
oppression.‖ Scholars interested in digital geographies would benefit from a deeper engagement with
these critiques in order to disaggregate the figure of the ‗human‘ often invoked in the literature and
account for the ways that applications of AI and robotics work to reproduce the liberal Humanist
subject at the same time that humans may be partially decentered from analysis. The development of
robots for use in security and policing, health care, education, and reproductive work, among other

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areas, places them at the heart of contemporary regimes of biopolitical—and increasingly
psychopolitical (Han, 2017)—management and control through which humans are differentially

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privileged or dehumanized. By studying the development and implementation of social robots across
the spaces of everyday life, geographers can continue to build on the already impressive work by

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Rose (2017), Jefferson (2020), Elwood (2020), and others exploring the reproduction of difference,
exclusion, and oppression through emerging regimes of digital life.
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Conclusion
This commentary has argued that the development of social robots and their deployment in the
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spaces of everyday life presents an important opportunity for critical geographic research. In
addition to immediate empirical questions, a critical engagement with social robotics has much to
offer digital geographic theory on questions of space, intelligence, affect and emotion, and the
‗human.‘ Yet, there are several challenges to conducting research in this area. Robotics companies
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are generally quite secretive and do not make much information about their robots or their uses
publicly available. While increasingly common, social robots are not (yet?) ubiquitous in everyday life
making it difficult to identify exactly when, where, and how they are being used. The everyday use of
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robots in many settings likely appears quite mundane and unextraordinary—at least after the initial
novelty wears off. Finally, roboticists in academia and other research settings—like any other area of
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computing—communicate through specialized discourse that is often opaque to non-specialists.

None of these issues are particularly unique to the study of social robotics, however, but rather
reflect the broader methodological challenges involved in much digital geographies research.
Overcoming these challenges will require methodological creativity and an openness to
interdisciplinary collaborations and engagements—including with critical voices in the fields of AI
and robotics themselves. Finally, while the novelty of the commercial social robotics industry makes
it difficult to study, it also presents an opportunity for scholars to trace its emergence—its successes,
failures, and evolutions—allowing for critical and nuanced accounts of its impacts, entanglements,
and future potentials.

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Declaration of interests

☒ The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal
relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

☐The authors declare the following financial interests/personal relationships which may be considered
as potential competing interests:

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