Theorizing the Real in Social Robot Care Technologies in Japan

Abstract

Japanese care centers have seen an increasing reliance on robotic assistance in service and social-care tasks, which poses questions about ethics, governance, and caregiving practices. This article addresses the concept of robotics as a media technology, and the role of human agency in shaping imagination as an interpretive framework as it reflects on two specific points of debate; (1) whether the humanoid robot Pepper, deployed in an elder-care nursing home in Japan, has some form of agency in its interaction with a nursing home resident; and (2) whether appropriate anthropological debates about being (properly reframed with regard to difference) provide insight into the reality of robot care. Adapting an approach by anthropologist Boellstorff (2016), whose work focuses on the reality of virtual worlds, this article analyzes whether questions regarding the real of robot care are questions of being, i.e. of ontology. Conflating the interhuman with the real and the robotic with the unreal—or, in this case, conflating human care with the real (authentic) and robot care with the unreal (artificial)—can negatively affect our ability to discuss the reality of the robotic. The ontological turn can yield important insights, but its potential is lost if what is real is preassigned to the physical.