Open AccessRobots and the Fallacy of Agency
Author(s) -
ALLEN STEWART
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
ethnographic praxis in industry conference proceedings
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 1559-8918
pISSN - 1559-890X
DOI - 10.1111/1559-8918.2019.01262
Subject(s) - agency (philosophy) , humanity , blueprint , aside , set (abstract data type) , sociology , environmental ethics , epistemology , fallacy , computer science , political science , social science , engineering , philosophy , law , linguistics , programming language , mechanical engineering
What if I told you, that humans are not very special? That the very qualities that make us human are not pre‐given features but are rather properties generated by our participation in the world at large. In this view, humans are not mere expressions of blueprints. Rather, we are shaped and fashioned in the course of our lives by many different environments. This presentation challenges the notion of agency itself through an exploration of a recent project we conducted on service robots and human interaction. I raise questions on the nature of our humanness and the idea of ‘humanity’ as a special, protected class. If we set aside humans as special and unique, we tend to then dehumanise and downscale everything that is non‐human, setting the stage for our current malaise where our environment is objectified as a resource to be used up as quickly as possible. I conclude that a shared and sustainable world is one where the qualities of life are accorded to all things, human and non‐human alike.