The Iron Cage of Social Robotics

This article focuses on the conviction that has been popular within parts of the Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) community and beyond that social robots are or soon will become part of our everyday lives. Given the limited availability of social robots on the market and their evident absence in everyday environments, such a conviction is viewed here as highly inaccurate and, hence, quite astonishing in its prevalence and power. We argue that since social robots continue to be research platforms in the first place, depicting them as everyday objects leads to a profound paradox that hinders the successful integration of robots into society. A big part of the problem is in rigid conceptualisations of the social robot and conventional views of everyday life. In an attempt to offer an alternative approach, we propose to redefine the dominant perspectives on 'interaction' in HRI research to embrace the notion of 'integration' and 'lived experience' instead and by doing so, capture the complexity and transformative potential of the everyday. We argue that 'everyday life' can potentially become not so much a point of arrival as a point of departure for HRI research and a catalyst for critical and creative thinking of human-robot futures.