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Travelling Robots and Their Cultural Baggage

Lasse Blond, Aarhus University, DK

Socially assistive robots are seen as assets when envisaging the future of health- and social services in Nordic welfare societies. The South Korean robot Silbot was transferred to Danish and Finnish nursery homes to test its’ potential of treating or slowing down the progression of dementia among elderly citizens by engaging them in interactive cognitive exercises. This was done with various results.

Transfer of technology is too often thought of as a matter of relocating hardware. The import of robots from Asia to Europe challenges this comprehension - as these robots are more than a piece of hardware; they bring along with them cultural baggage of a foreign sociotechnical imaginary. In the case of Silbot the effort to adopt the robot to the Finnish and Danish social services exposed unfamiliar and cultural-dependent views of care, cognition, health and human nature.

Studying Silbot in “the wild” in Denmark highlighted these issues as well as shedding light on the human-robot interaction and the effort of adopting the robot to real life praxis. This empirical study of the mixture of human and automated machines highlights the importance of comprehending robots as parts of sociotechnical ensembles and to observe how humans get along with our technology. The study of Silbot in its’ natural setting asks profound philosophical questions about robotics, autonomy and the mediating role of new technologies. However, this case also emphasizes the importance of understanding technology transfer, and the transfer of robots in particular, as a two-way interaction consisting of technology shaping culture and just as important the cultural shaping of technology.