Bots

What kinds of uncertainties does the robotization of the domestic sphere and everyday life involve, and what are the cultural logics of robotization? This chapter is an imaginary dialogue between human authors and social robots, along the lines of Turing’s machine impossibilities or “disabilities”. First, we think about the range of social roles that robots perform, and tackle the impossible notion that machines would genuinely feel and connect. Then we consider embodied, gendered and sexual performances specifically, and open up the impossibility of a machine falling in love and making someone fall in love with it. Finally, we approach the anxieties that emerge in relation to bots’ predictive capacity, and raise questions of autonomy. With this discussion we illustrate how the domestication of bots disturbs the human/machine binary in tangible ways, and how social robots become uncertain archives themselves.