Embodied essentialism in the reconstruction of the animal sign in robot animal design

Abstract

Robot animals are important for the interpretation of the biological world. In this paper, I show that specific design solutions for robot animal signs usually privilege the overall perception of biological systems (and animal signs in general) as machinic entities, which ignores the role of identity self-generation and sustainability, the hallmark of biological signs. Animal signs are semiotic systems that operate roughly on three subsystems: affordance mapping (related with niche construction and embeddedness), essence categorization, displaying co-enabling relations within the animal system, and sensorimotor autonomy. Of these interrelated systems, the first two are commonly associated with robot animal design and conceptualization, whereas the third one suffers from the unsolved AI design problem of engineering true context-dependent sensitivity. As a result, a semiotic blindness toward biological organisms has derived in dissociated perceptions of robot animals as objects that emulate their biological counterparts through both biomorphic affordance design (biomorphism) and bioinspired task completion. Robot signs are thus confined to the realm of techno myths populating experimental settings narratives, which contributes to a diminishing awareness of biological diversity and animal uniqueness for the construction and preservation of the Umwelt.