doiSerbia

On cultural dispositions of service robotics

Wiegerling Klaus (Institut für Technikfolgenabschätzung und Systemanalyse (ITAS), Karlsruhe Institute für Technologie (KIT), Karlsruhe)

This article focuses on questions concerning cultural bases of service robotics. Discussions on and responding to such questions remain underaddressed in discourses on service robot­ics. First, we will consider the ways in which service robotics can be independent from cul­tural markers. Cultural dispositions influence the desired adaptibility and autonomy of the system, especially its sensorials and movers. Service robotics must be designed as culturally situated technology. Only in physical and simbolic clossness to concrete human being can it become adaptable and cooperative system. It does not support only organs but also organic preferances. Not only it moves beyond organs but cultural markers are raised to a higher level. The latter leads to a special dynamics of culture, articulating new desires and values previuosly unattained but now technically realizable. The possibility of mediation of forms of life that follows the technological upgrade of social life liberates us from many vital activ­ities but at the same time poses new cultural and social limits. Service robotics helps us in questioning the bases of our cohabitation and forces us to model and reflect such a basis.

Keywords: adaptibility, decontextualization, technical autonomy, interaction, man/system, humanoid systems