Reprogramming the Future in China: Robot Revolution

• In Event: Automation and the Transition to the Robotocene: Towards a Robotocene?

Abstract

My talk and paper will be based on the ethnographic work on educational robotics for young children that I did in 2016 in Shanghai, and future fieldwork in a robot museum and household use of robots in China.
In the context of China, the main narrative, as exemplified by the state-run Chinese media, is that China is in the process of leaving behind its economy, based on mass manufacturing, in order to leap to its high-technology future: robots are becoming a more and more frequent device, both rhetorical and mechanical, used to achieve this leap. China, both in commentary on its own economy and in frequent, sometimes nationalistic comparisons with Japan and the United States, aspires to be different and better, more advanced technologically; the image of robots becomes an instrumental component of these dreams of supermodernity.
I would argue that a robot, both as a discursive formation and as a powerful primordial, transcendental, and future-oriented teleological body, is a figure working in new ways in governmentality. In my talk, I will focus on the mechanisms of how robots work in governance. Moreover, I will try to disrupt the substitutability thesis that gets often employed when talking about robots and humans.

Author

• Daria Savchenko, Harvard University