The Silicone Hand Extended
Towards an Emerging Robotic Sociality
Keywords:
social robotics, skin, new materialism, silicone, AIAbstract
In 2021, the English company Engineered Arts published their first YouTube video of one of the world’s most advanced social robots: Ameca. This grey humanoid recognizes its own embodiment and extends its silicone hand to the viewer. Social robots have been defined as machines capable of communicating and collaborating with humans, with the potential of befriending us. However, by applying a new materialist framework this article scrutinizes a social dilemma between humans and robots that unfolds in Ameca’s soft silicone skin. The article demonstrates how engineers attempt to inscribe their own conceptualizations of sociality onto the robotic body – an embodied AI entity that humans have yet to fully comprehend. Stereotypes around gender, racialization, and fixed emotional categories are embedded in the skin. However, Ameca reveals a distinct robotic sociality that attempts to free it from human control. The silicone skin can fracture or misalign with preprogrammed gestures; its affective expressions may contradict its body language; and it can invert the subject-object relationship between humans and machines. When silicone is conceptualized as an active agent, Ameca’s skin opens new possibilities for feeling and perception in AI that challenge human assumptions about life, artifice, and sociality. Social robots may become friends, foes, or something in-between that negotiate what sociality really means.
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