Toward a Critical Posthumanism for Social Robotics

In response to theorists of the social-relational turn as a framework for making sense of how humans relate with social robots, I offer an in-depth critique into underlying arguments related to differences in origin as a foundational reason for dismissing posthumanist perspectives in social robotics. In particular, I argue that critical posthumanist sensibilities for social robotics can offer generative accounts for making sense of the relation among, between, and with humans and social robots. Unpacking how arguments separating humans and robots related to origin-genesis-collapse when considering critical posthumanist insights on anthropogenesis, biogenesis, and technogenesis, I explore the value of a critical posthumanist approach in social robotics. A critical posthumanism for social robotics displaces dichotomous nature-culture or natural-artificial binaries and instead embraces an entangled view of relationality. This essay starts to work toward realizing posthumanism's critical sensibilities that take into account the scalar impact of the planetary meta-condition of the Anthropocene on humans, robots, and their relations.