Mark Coeckelbergh

How can we make sense of the idea of ‘personal’ or ‘social’ relations with robots? Starting from a social and phenomenological approach to human–robot relations, this paper explores how we can better understand and evaluate these relations by attending to the ways our conscious experience of the robot and the human–robot relation is mediated by language. It is argued that our talk about and to robots is not a mere representation of an objective robotic or social-interactive reality, but rather interprets and co-shapes our relation to these artificial quasi-others. Our use of language also changes as a result of our experiences and practices. This happens when people start talking to robots. In addition, this paper responds to the ethical objection that talking to and with robots is both unreal and deceptive. It is concluded that in order to give meaning to human–robot relations, to arrive at a more balanced ethical judgment, and to reflect on our current form of life, we should complement existing objective-scientific methodologies of social robotics and interaction studies with interpretations of the words, conversations, and stories in and about human–robot relations.

Whereas standard approaches to risk and vulnerability presuppose a strict separation between humans and their world, this book develops an existential-phenomenological approach according to which we are always already beings-at-risk. Moreover, it is argued that in our struggle against vulnerability, we create new vulnerabilities and thereby transform ourselves as much as we transform the world. Responding to the discussion about human enhancement and information technologies, the book then shows that this dynamic-relational approach has important implications for the evaluation of new technologies and their risks. It calls for a normative anthropology of vulnerability that does not ask which objective risks are acceptable, how we can become invulnerable, or which technologies threaten human nature, but which vulnerability transformations we want. To the extent that we can steer the growth of new technologies at all, this tragic and sometimes comic project should therefore be guided by what we want to become.​

Responding to long-standing warnings that robots and AI will enslave humans, I argue that the main problem we face is not that automation might turn us into slaves but, rather, that we remain masters. First I construct an argument concerning what I call ‘the tragedy of the master’: using the master–slave dialectic, I argue that automation technologies threaten to make us vulnerable, alienated, and automated masters. I elaborate the implications for power, knowledge, and experience. Then I critically discuss and question this argument but also the very thinking in terms of masters and slaves, which fuels both arguments. I question the discourse about slavery and object to the assumptions made about human–technology relations. However, I also show that the discussion about masters and slaves attends us to issues with human–human relations, in particular to the social consequences of automation such as power issues and the problem of the relation between automation and (un)employment. Finally, I reflect on how we can respond to our predicament, to ‘the tragedy of the master’