ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Agency, Politics, and Ideology in the Histories of Japanese Robotics

• In Event: Actors, Agents, and Experts in Computing and AI: Decision-making and Contested Authority in Automated Realms

English Abstract

Do robots have agency? Some histories of Japanese robots attribute the country’s advancement in robotics to a cultural proclivity to recognize the agency of non-human beings. Such histories resonate with humanistic values of decentering the American hegemony in the history of science and technology, deprivileging male policymakers and engineers, giving voice to those who were silenced or ignored, and emphasizing non-human agency. A closer examination, however, reveals that such histories were constructed to serve conservative rhetoric. Naturalizing robotic agency re-blackboxes and mystifies this technology, concealing economic interests and labor dynamics, reproducing biases, absolving human actors of responsibility, and mollifying the need for social reform.

This talk argues that for users to be empowered, they need to understand what went into creating the technology they use. This talk focuses on the second half of the twentieth century, when the histories that emphasize the national traits of ‘loving’ robots were constructed, but before most users could interface with actual robots. The talk shows that the rhetoric of robotic agency emerged from the nationalistic discourse of the early 1980s and was repeatedly co-opted by Japanese policymakers to promote socially conservative agendas and avoid progressive reforms. The talk also argues that the real drivers of the development of technologies that emulate agency and empathy were technology policies meant to address labor shortages and economic slowdown, as well as corporate interests in commodifying loneliness.

Author

• Yulia Frumer, Johns Hopkins University