Socio-Technical Hybrid Societies: A Systemic Approach to Human-Machine Interactions

This work unfolds on three consequential levels: first, a socio-political analysis of Social Robotics, to correctly relocates the relationship between the robot and the social. This re-location will challenge the liminal zone between human and non-human in the anthropocentric tradition. The scope of the first part of this essay is to understand at what condition a technology, as social robots, will change society as a whole. This question entails a theory of the functioning of socio-technical systems: the first chapter will make an attempt in this direction. First, we will reshape our understanding of the concept of “social system” through the Latour’s Actor-Network theory and the concept of “sociomorphing”, coming from Seibt's reflections. We will show how non-human actors can be considered on the same level of human ones in shaping the social. Then, we will face an issue that will require to step back from social robotics, to build a theory of change in social systems. This will lead us in the system theory applied to the social, through the lenses of Maturana and Varela, and the contribution of Simondon and Badiou. Finally, we will apply our conclusion to the analysis of the political implications of social robots. In the following section, we will analyse the one-to-one human-robot interaction, in order to understand the implications of HRI, at the level of subjective and intersubjective organisations. Sherry Turkle and Mark Coeckelbergh already underlined the difficulty of conceptualising the human-robot relationship from a psychological and philosophical point of view. In this second section we will attempt to answer two questions: what is, from the point of view of relational mechanisms, the specificity of human-robot intersubjective relations? How can they influence, alter, contaminate human-human relations and with what effects? In this discussion, we will employ different perspectives ranging from the current discussion on the “deception objection”, to the framework of the symbolic argument. After discussing the existing approaches, we will propose a theoretical solution to the problem of HRI relational implications, adopting conceptual tools coming from Donald Winnicott, Jessica Benjamin and Jacques Lacan. In the conclusions, we will discuss some implications of this essay for the design of social robots, sketching three conclusions of a non-anthropocentric view of hybrid socio-technical systems: i) Sociality is a property of a system; ii) Anthropomorphic interactions are a subclass of sociomorphic interactions, and they have always been; iii)Analysing hybrid interactional systems, we will discover new forms of social acting.