Abstract
This essay interrogates the common assumption that good care is necessarily human care. It looks to disruptive fictional representations of robot care to assist its development of a theory of posthuman care that jettisons the implied anthropocentrism of ethics of care philosophy but retains care’s foregrounding of entanglement, embodiment and obligation. The essay reads speculative representations of robot care, particularly the Swedish television programme Äkta människor ( Real Humans), alongside ethics of care philosophy and critical posthumanism to highlight their synergetic critiques of neoliberal affective economies and humanist hierarchies that treat some bodies and affects as more real than others. These texts and discourses assist me in proposing a theory of care that regards vulnerability as the normative effect of posthuman vital embodiment, as opposed to an anomalous state that can be overcome or corrected via neoliberal practice.
Highlights
As Teresa Heffernan demonstrates, science and speculative fiction have played a crucial role in shaping the development of robots and it is commonplace for engineers and designers to cite particular fictional entities, from C3P0 and R2D2, to Rosie the Robot and Johnny Five as inspiration (2003: 74)
As Heffernan makes clear, developers are often disinclined to attend to the nuance of the fictional representations that inspire them, conveniently overlooking the dystopic outcomes and ethical transgressions that typically characterize the robot fictions of Isaac Asimov, Philip K
I explore the disruptive potential of robot fictions, for scientific discourses devoted to fantasies of linear progress, and to the larger debates circulating both inside and outside of academia around the ethics of social robots designed for care
Summary
Speculative representations that imagine robot care are helpful guides for thinking with and about the ethics, aesthetics and politics of posthuman care. Though conventional in many ways, the series provokes compelling questions about care in posthuman worlds, representing and invoking fears of a robot revolution and the collapse of human exceptionalism It treats the rise of the robots as a catalyst for political, legal and social debate, conjuring the hubot as one of (araway s odd boundary creatures (1991: 2) that destabilizes humanism, liberal democracy, and inflames the populist right. In Äkta människor, humanoid robots are used for a variety of menial tasks, including factory work, sex work, housekeeping, childcare, and eldercare Such usage is widely accepted by society, whereas emotional attachment is hotly debated: women who wish to have romantic relationships with their hubots are dismissed as hubbies and the elderly character Lennart hides his tremendous affection for his outdated and malfunctioning bot, Odi, whom he sequesters in the basement rather than facing its inevitable disposal. In a time of populist politics in which an overtly us versus them political discourse frames racialized others as dangerous and disposable, Äkta människor s interrogation of literal disposable bodies is unnervingly pertinent
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