Designing Robots, Designing Humans

by Cathrine Hasse (editor)

Whilst most research concentrates on the imagined future of robotics, this book brings together a group of international researchers to explore the different ways that robots and humans engage with one another at this point in history.Robotic design is advancing at an incredible pace, and consequently the role of robots has expanded beyond mechanical work in the industrial sector to the social and domestic environment. From kitchen table pets in the shape of dinosaurs or baby seals, to robot arms that assist with eating, to self-driving cars, this book explores the psychological impact of robotic engagement, especially in domestic settings. Each chapter explores a different aspect of humanoid robotics, for example, the relationship between robotics and gender, citizenship, moral agency, ethics, inequality, and psychological development, as well as exploring the growing role of robots in education, care work, and intimate relationships.Drawing on research from across the fields of psychology, anthropology, and philosophy, this ground-breaking volume discusses the emerging social side of robotics. By examining our relationship with robots now, this book offers a new and innovative opportunity for understanding our future with robots and robotic culture. Designing Robots, Designing Humans will be interest to researchers of artificial intelligence and humanoid robotics, as well as researchers from cognitive and social psychology, philosophy, computer science, anthropology, linguistics, and engineering backgrounds.

148 pages, Kindle Edition

Published July 24, 2019

About the author

Cathrine Hasse has a long expertise in studying the relation between learning and culture in organizations with a special focus on universities and technical laboratories as workplaces. She is trained as an anthropologist and a cultural psychologist and her main study object (material-conceptual cultural learning processes) have through many years of academic work steadily increased her insight in a wide variety of engineering activities and physics at university level as well as schools. In recent years, these insights have been contextualized by knowledge of how culture influence material-conceptual learning processes in physics, AI and robotic engineering in a number of European countries. She is, and has been, coordinator of EU-projects, as well as projects financed by the Danish Research Council. She is also a member of several advisory boards and as well as a present and former member of boards of educational institutions. She has contributed as an evaluator of several university disciplines (including the interdisciplinary structures at Linköping University). Her present academic work is concentrated on how people in Europe are affected by new technologies such as robots, drones and AI. She did her PhD. on "cultural learning processes" in a physics institute where she followed a group of young male and female physicists' students in their first years of study. This project developed into a longitudinal study. She has followed the same group of students for more than 6 years. In her next project The Cultural Dimensions of Science she compared university institutions in Denmark and Italy and after this project she became the co-coordinator of an EU project, financed by EU 6th framework programme, UPGEM (Understanding Puzzles in the Gendered European Map) and is now the coordinator of the REELER (Responsible and Ethical Learning in Robotics) project (reeler.eu). In her research work she takes a special interest in the relations between culture, learning, concept-making, new materialism, posthumanism, gender and education. She is presently the coordinator of a project on the relation between workplace learning and technological literacy funded by the Danish Strategic Research Council. She is the author of several books on cultural learning processes, education, robotics and AI and methodology, and has an international as well as Danish bulk of peer-reviewed journal articles in her portfolio, just as she is an active conference speaker on a number of conferences including conferences with broad interests in the development of Science and Technology Studies (STS) postphenomenology, cultural psychology, learning theory, as well as the future of universities.